Chebifier: automating semantic classification in ChEBI to accelerate data-driven discovery

Connecting chemical structural representations with meaningful categories and semantic annotations representing existing knowledge enables data-driven digital discovery from chemistry data. Ontologies are semantic annotation resources that provide definitions and a classification hierarchy for a domain. They are widely used throughout the life sciences. ChEBI is a large-scale ontology for the domain of biologically interesting chemistry that connects representations of chemical structures with meaningful chemical and biological categories. Classifying novel molecular structures into ontologies such as ChEBI has been a longstanding objective for data scientific methods, but the approaches that have been developed to date are limited in several ways: they are not able to expand as the ontology expands without manual intervention, and they are not able to learn from continuously expanding data. We have developed an approach for automated classification of chemicals in the ChEBI ontology based on a neuro-symbolic AI technique that harnesses the ontology itself to create the learning system. We provide this system as a publicly available tool, Chebifier, and as an API, ChEB-AI. We here evaluate our approach and show how it constitutes an advance towards a continuously learning semantic system for chemical knowledge discovery.