In today’s world where write-ups and research papers are so common that you can’t complete your degree without publishing a research paper. There is not an exact number of scientific journals present but an estimate of 30,000 journals and around 2 million articles are being published each year. So you may be searching for a specific thing but you are not able to find what you want and eventually, after spending a lot of time you come up with no results. And if you want to get the specialized go ahead and read them all. You can’t ban the Scientific knowledge to be published further. And it will grow exponentially over time. So what to do? The answers come in the form of Literature-based discovery.

What is Literature-based discovery?

So there are 2 key terms Literature and discovery let me define what each term means.
Literature- It encapsulates all the Research papers and other academic publications. All the existing knowledge yet.

In all the scientific publications, even on the same topic, you will find something different and no article or research paper can be said as complete there is always a loop-hole in it which gives rise to the reproducibility of publication. Also, many publications are different based on the topic but there are ways that both can be linked by some common features. For Example, there is one publication showing that illness A is caused by chemical B. And there is another publication showing drug C is known to reduce the amount of chemical B in the body. Now there is transitive dependence between A and C which is not present in both articles. But can we create a new one showing the relation between A and C? So, the answer is yes. In this case A→B and B→C so A→C.

But it is quite possible the linking of A and C is already present in literature, if not then this relation is analyzed by judgmental techniques. If not verified then it can be rejected as well. So now we got a way to discover new knowledge from existing knowledge, and we can do so by intervention.

What is NLP?

Do you know that we humans have experience of 25 million years in speaking and we have just 5500 years of experience in writing? So you can see the huge difference between both. So, summarizing we humans are much comfortable and good at speaking rather than writing. So is there any way so we can communicate with the devices around us like our PC, mobile phones, or other gadgets? The answers come as yes, you can using NLP.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. So you can become the speaker and your device is going to act as a listener. Not just this, NLP can also analyze the text written anywhere, gives you recommendations, etc.

Using NLP in LBD

NLP can also be used to synthesize literature and to extract knowledge from them and find new relationships between discoveries if exists. Now the reader can eliminate the relation which are rather not interesting or which is wrong.

So summarizing, NLP is a booming area in Artificial Intelligence and it has a lot of capabilities and it can be used in Literature-based discovery as well. We can now discover new knowledge from existing literature. LBD systems can be used in many ways, especially in the field of academics. For example potential treatments for cancer, adverse drug event (ADE) prediction, accelerating the development of developing countries, and so on.