PKAG-DDI: Pairwise Knowledge-Augmented Language Model for Drug-Drug Interaction Event Text Generation

Ziyan Wang, Zhankun Xiong, Feng Huang, Wen Zhang


Abstract
Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) arise when multiple drugs are administered concurrently. Accurately predicting the specific mechanisms underlying DDIs (named DDI events or DDIEs) is critical for the safe clinical use of drugs. DDIEs are typically represented as textual descriptions. However, most computational methods focus more on predicting the DDIE class label over generating human-readable natural language increasing clinicians’ interpretation costs. Furthermore, current methods overlook the fact that each drug assumes distinct biological functions in a DDI, which, when used as input context, can enhance the understanding of the DDIE process and benefit DDIE generation by the language model (LM). In this work, we propose a novel pairwise knowledge-augmented generative method (termed PKAG-DDI) for DDIE text generation. It consists of a pairwise knowledge selector efficiently injecting structural information between drugs bidirectionally and simultaneously to select pairwise biological functions from the knowledge set, and a pairwise knowledge integration strategy that matches and integrates the selected biological functions into the LM. Experiments on two professional datasets show that PKAG-DDI outperforms existing methods in DDIE text generation, especially in challenging inductive scenarios, indicating its practicality and generalization.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.539
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10996–11010
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.539/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ziyan Wang, Zhankun Xiong, Feng Huang, and Wen Zhang. 2025. PKAG-DDI: Pairwise Knowledge-Augmented Language Model for Drug-Drug Interaction Event Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10996–11010, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PKAG-DDI: Pairwise Knowledge-Augmented Language Model for Drug-Drug Interaction Event Text Generation (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.539.pdf