Identifying collaborations among researchers: a pattern-based approach

In recent years a huge amount of publications and scientific reports has become available through digital libraries and online databases. Digital libraries commonly provide advanced search interfaces, through which researchers can find and explore the most related scientific studies. Even though the publications of a single author can be easily retrieved and explored, understanding how authors have collaborated with each other on specific research topics and to what extent their collaboration have been fruitful is, in general, a challenging task. This paper proposes a new pattern-based approach to analyzing the correlations among the authors of most influential research studies. To this purpose, it analyzes publication data retrieved from digital libraries and online databases by means of an itemset-based data mining algorithm. It automatically extracts patterns representing the most relevant collaborations among authors on specific research topics. Patterns are evaluated and ranked according to the number of citations received by the corresponding publications. The proposed approach was validated in a real case study, i.e., the analysis of scientific literature on genomics. Specifically, we first analyzed scientific studies on genomics acquired from the OMIM database to discover correlations between authors and genes or genetic disorders. Then, the reliability of the discovered patterns was assessed using the PubMed search engine. The results show that, for the majority of the mined patterns, the most influential (top ranked) studies retrieved by performing author-driven PubMed queries range over the same gene/genetic disorder indicated by the top ranked pattern

Cheap IR Evaluation: Fewer Topics, No Relevance Judgements, and Crowdsourced Assessments

To evaluate Information Retrieval (IR) effectiveness, a possible approach is to use test collections, which are composed of a collection of documents, a set of description of information needs (called topics), and a set of relevant documents to each topic. Test collections are modelled in a competition scenario: for example, in the well known TREC initiative, participants run their own retrieval systems over a set of topics and they provide a ranked list of retrieved documents; some of the retrieved documents (usually the first ranked) constitute the so called pool, and their relevance is evaluated by human assessors; the document list is then used to compute effectiveness metrics and rank the participant systems. Private Web Search companies also run their in-house evaluation exercises; although the details are mostly unknown, and the aims are somehow different, the overall approach shares several issues with the test collection approach. The aim of this work is to: (i) develop and improve some state-of-the-art work on the evaluation of IR effectiveness while saving resources, and (ii) propose a novel, more principled and engineered, overall approach to test collection based effectiveness evaluation. [...

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction