  Capturing the semantics of related biological concepts, such as genes and
mutations, is of significant importance to many research tasks in computational
biology such as protein-protein interaction detection, gene-drug association
prediction, and biomedical literature-based discovery. Here, we propose to
leverage state-of-the-art text mining tools and machine learning models to
learn the semantics via vector representations (aka. embeddings) of over
400,000 biological concepts mentioned in the entire PubMed abstracts. Our
learned embeddings, namely BioConceptVec, can capture related concepts based on
their surrounding contextual information in the literature, which is beyond
exact term match or co-occurrence-based methods. BioConceptVec has been
thoroughly evaluated in multiple bioinformatics tasks consisting of over 25
million instances from nine different biological datasets. The evaluation
results demonstrate that BioConceptVec has better performance than existing
methods in all tasks. Finally, BioConceptVec is made freely available to the
research community and general public via
https://github.com/ncbi-nlp/BioConceptVec.
