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

A developmental approach to language acquisition: two case studies

The aim of this article is to revitalize and extend functionalist approaches to language use and language acquisition by utilizing a theory which focuses on general issues of human development. The emphasis here is to show how such developmental considerations enable one to reconstruct a growing child\u27s own efforts to acquire and use a language in increasing accord with cultural demands as to a telos of language development. Two case studies are presented. The first one deals with early phases of language use, in which we analyse subtle ontogenetic changes in the organization and reorganization of personal pronouns referring to the Self. In the second case study, we focus on language modifications during later ontogenesis, analysing the changing functions involving the nominal-pronominal contrast and the contrast between particular tense-aspect markings. It is argued that the ontogenetic changes in both sub-domains are illuminated by exploiting in their analyses Werner & Kaplan\u27s Orthogenetic Principle, in which development is defined in terms of increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration in human functioning. In a final section, we distinguish our Developmental Approach to language acquisition and language use from other functionalist approaches. © 1991, Sage Publications. All rights reserved