Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Impact resistance of functionally layered two-stage fibrous concrete

The impact resistance of functionally layered two-stage fibrous concrete (FLTSFC) prepared using the cement grout injection technique was examined in this study. The impact resistance of turtle shells served as the inspiration for the development of FLTSFC. Steel and polypropylene fibres are used in more significant quantities than usual in the outer layers of FLTSFC, resulting in significantly improved impact resistance. An experiment was carried out simultaneously to assess the efficacy of one-layered and two-layered concrete to assess the effectiveness of three-layered FLTSFC. When performing the drop-mass test ACI 544, a modified version of the impact test was suggested to reduce the scattered results. Instead of a solid cylindrical specimen with no notch, a line-notched specimen was used instead. This improvement allows for the pre-definition of a fracture route and the reduction of the scattering of results. The testing criteria used in the experiments were impact numbers associated to first crack and failure, mode of failure, and ductility index. The coefficient of variation of the ACI impact test was lowered due to the proposed change, indicating that the scattering of results was substantially reduced. This research contributes to the idea of developing enhanced, more impact-resistant fibre composites for use in possible protective structures in the future

Investigating the dependence structure between credit default swap spreads and the U.S. financial market

Archimedean copulas, Concordance measures, Credit risk, Market risk, Risk management, Tail dependence, C16, C32, D81,