Question Answering Over Biological Knowledge Graph via Amazon Alexa

Structured and unstructured data and facts about drugs, genes, protein, viruses, and their mechanism are spread across a huge number of scientific articles. These articles are a large-scale knowledge source and can have a huge impact on disseminating knowledge about the mechanisms of certain biological processes. A knowledge graph (KG) can be constructed by integrating such facts and data and be used for data integration, exploration, and federated queries. However, exploration and querying large-scale KGs is tedious for certain groups of users due to a lack of knowledge about underlying data assets or semantic technologies. A question-answering (QA) system allows the answer of natural language questions over KGs automatically using triples contained in a KG. Recently, the use and adaption of digital assistants are getting wider owing to their capability at enabling users to voice commands to control smart systems or devices. This paper is about using Amazon Alexa's voice-enabled interface for QA over KGs. As a proof-of-concept, we use the well-known DisgeNET KG, which contains knowledge covering 1.13 million gene-disease associations between 21,671 genes and 30,170 diseases, disorders, and clinical or abnormal human phenotypes. Our study shows how Alex could be of help to find facts about certain biological entities from large-scale knowledge bases.