Textual Evidence Mining via Spherical Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding

Scientific literature, as one of the major knowledge resources, provides abundant textual evidence that has great potential to support high-quality scientific hypothesis validation. In this paper, we study the problem of textual evidence mining in scientific literature: given a scientific hypothesis as a query triplet, find the textual evidence sentences in scientific literature that support the input query. A critical challenge for textual evidence mining in scientific literature is to retrieve high-quality textual evidence without human supervision. Because it is non-trivial to obtain a large set of human-annotated articles containing evidence sentences in scientific literature. To tackle this challenge, we propose EvidenceMiner, a high-quality textual evidence retrieval method for scientific literature without human-annotated training examples. To achieve high-quality textual evidence retrieval, we leverage heterogeneous information from both existing knowledge bases and massive unstructured text. We propose to construct a large heterogeneous information network (HIN) to build connections between the user-input queries and the candidate evidence sentences. Based on the constructed HIN, we propose a novel HIN embedding method that directly embeds the nodes onto a spherical space to improve the retrieval performance. Quantitative experiments on a huge biomedical literature corpus (over 4 million sentences) demonstrate that EvidenceMiner significantly outperforms baseline methods for unsupervised textual evidence retrieval. Case studies also demonstrate that our HIN construction and embedding greatly benefit many downstream applications such as textual evidence interpretation and synonym meta-pattern discovery.