We propose a novel neural method to extract drug-drug interactions (DDIs) from texts using external drug molecular structure information. We encode textual drug pairs with convolutional neural networks and their molecular pairs with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and then we concatenate the outputs of these two networks. In the experiments, we show that GCNs can predict DDIs from the molecular structures of drugs in high accuracy and the molecular information can enhance text-based DDI extraction by 2.39 percent points in the F-score on the DDIExtraction 2013 shared task data set.
The DDIExtraction 2013 task concerns the recognition of drugs and extraction of drugdrug interactions that appear in biomedical literature. We propose two subtasks for the DDIExtraction 2013 Shared Task challenge: 1) the recognition and classification of drug names and 2) the extraction and classification of their interactions. Both subtasks have been very successful in participation and results. There were 14 teams who submitted a total of 38 runs. The best result reported for the first subtask was F1 of 71.5 and 65.1 for the second one.