Using citation-context to reduce topic drifting on pure citation-based recommendation

Recent works in the area of academic recommender systems have demonstrated the effectiveness of co-citation and citation closeness in related-document recommendations. However, documents recommended from such systems may drift away from the main theme of the query document. In this work, we investigate whether incorporating the textual information in close proximity to a citation as well as the citation position could reduce such drifting and further increase the performance of the recommender system. To investigate this, we run experiments with several recommendation methods on a newly created and now publicly available dataset containing 53 million unique citation-based records. We then conduct a user-based evaluation with domain-knowledgeable participants. Our results show that a new method based on the combination of Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA), topic modelling and word embeddings achieves more than 20% improvement in Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) compared to CPA

The Sonic Hedgehog Pathway Stimulates Prostate Tumor Growth by Paracrine Signaling and Recaptures Embryonic Gene Expression in Tumor Myofibroblasts

The Hedgehog (Hh) pathway contributes to prostate cancer growth and progression. The presence of robust Shh expression in both normal prostate and localized cancer challenged us to explain the unique growth promoting effect in cancer. We show here that paracrine Hh signaling exerts a non-cell autonomous effect on xenograft tumor growth and that Hh pathway activation in myofibroblasts alone is sufficient to stimulate tumor growth. Nine genes regulated by Hh in the mesenchyme of the developing prostate were found to be regulated in the stroma of Hh over-expressing xenograft tumors. Correlation analysis of gene expression in matched specimens of benign and malignant human prostate tissue revealed a partial 5 gene fingerprint of Hh-regulated expression in stroma of all cancers and the complete 9 gene fingerprint in the subset of tumors exhibiting a reactive stroma. No expression fingerprint was observed in benign tissues. We conclude that changes in the prostate stroma due to association with cancer result in an altered transcriptional response to Hh that mimics the growth promoting actions of the fetal mesenchyme. Patients with an abundance of myofibroblasts in biopsy tissue may comprise a sub-group that will exhibit a particularly good response to anti-Hedgehog therapy

VMEXT: A Visualization Tool for Mathematical Expression Trees

Mathematical expressions can be represented as a tree consisting of terminal symbols, such as identifiers or numbers (leaf nodes), and functions or operators (non-leaf nodes). Expression trees are an important mechanism for storing and processing mathematical expressions as well as the most frequently used visualization of the structure of mathematical expressions. Typically, researchers and practitioners manually visualize expression trees using general-purpose tools. This approach is laborious, redundant, and error-prone. Manual visualizations represent a user's notion of what the markup of an expression should be, but not necessarily what the actual markup is. This paper presents VMEXT - a free and open source tool to directly visualize expression trees from parallel MathML. VMEXT simultaneously visualizes the presentation elements and the semantic structure of mathematical expressions to enable users to quickly spot deficiencies in the Content MathML markup that does not affect the presentation of the expression. Identifying such discrepancies previously required reading the verbose and complex MathML markup. VMEXT also allows one to visualize similar and identical elements of two expressions. Visualizing expression similarity can support support developers in designing retrieval approaches and enable improved interaction concepts for users of mathematical information retrieval systems. We demonstrate VMEXT's visualizations in two web-based applications. The first application presents the visualizations alone. The second application shows a possible integration of the visualizations in systems for mathematical knowledge management and mathematical information retrieval. The application converts LaTeX input to parallel MathML, computes basic similarity measures for mathematical expressions, and visualizes the results using VMEXT.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, Intelligent Computer Mathematics - 10th International Conference CICM 2017, Edinburgh, UK, July 17-21, 2017, Proceeding

Mr. DLib: Recommendations-as-a-Service (RaaS) for Academia

Only few digital libraries and reference managers offer recommender systems, although such systems could assist users facing information overload. In this paper, we introduce Mr. DLib's recommendations-as-a-service, which allows third parties to easily integrate a recommender system into their products. We explain the recommender approaches implemented in Mr. DLib (content-based filtering among others), and present details on 57 million recommendations, which Mr. DLib delivered to its partner GESIS Sowiport. Finally, we outline our plans for future development, including integration into JabRef, establishing a living lab, and providing personalized recommendations.Comment: Accepted for publication at the JCDL conference 201

Analyzing the American and German governments\u27 usage of the web: Framing, and agenda-setting, and the Iraq war

This thesis presents how the American and German governments used their official websites to support or oppose the war in Iraq in 2003. This study is a qualitative framing analysis of www.whitehouse.gov, www.bundesregierung.de, the American newspaper New York Times, and the German newspaper Die Welt. The timeframe of documents examined in this study is from March 1st, 2003 until May 1st, 2003. The theories of framing and agenda-setting were used to examine the websites as well as the New York Times and Die Welt