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

Iterative linear programming procedure for estimating patterns of agricultural land use Supplement

Agricultural economics report 81.Cover title."This manual supplements 'An iterative linear programming procedure for estimating patterns of agricultural land use,' by the present authors."28 p. tablesDevelopment of land resources poses many problems for the planning agency. From the viewpoint of the economist perhaps the most important problems are those relating to the desirability of a project in terms of some income or efficiency objective. Typically, a project objective is stated as the maximization of individual, regional, or national income depending upon the jurisdiction of the developing organization. To effectively evaluate a land development, in terms of its objectives, it is necessary to anticipate the pattern of land use that will likely result in the project area. This study presents a quantitative approach for estimating land use patterns when use of the project land is restricted to agriculture. Planning problems concerned with agricultural as compared to non-agricultural uses, project financing, conditions of repayment, and form of tenure are ignored. The empirical application of the estimating procedure consists of estimating land use patterns for a project currently being undertaken by the State of Hawaii. Objectives: The primary objective is to develop a procedure for estimating the perfect competition equilibrium production of several crops, on lands of varying quality, in spatially separated producing areas. Market supply and demand equations are include in the model so that the patterns of land use will be established by market forces. The model indicates, by physical land productivity class and project area, the acreage used to produce each crop. It also gives the equilibrium market price and quantity supplied for each included commodity. The objective of the empirical applications of the model was to estimate patterns of land use based on different wage rate, labor availability, and unit size assumptions for several tracts of state-owned land that are included in a current development project. These lands, which are located at Waimanalo and Waianae Kai on the Island of Oahu and at Hoolehua on the Island of Molokai, make up the three project areas considered in this study. Procedure: The first step was to construct cost of production and yield budgets, by land productivity class, for a group of crops that represent most of the production alternatives faced by prospective farmers in the project areas. These budgets are based upon existing cost of production studies supplemented by interviews with crop specialists. Because of limited resources, only those crops for Which cost studies are presently available are included in the analysis. This group of crops includes pineapple, pasture, papaya, apple banana, tomatoes, snap-beans, cantaloupe and Manoa lettuce. Market supply and demand functions were developed for each crop and included in the estimating model. This was done in an effort to duplicate the market forces that actually contribute to the establishment of a land use pattern. For the purposes of this analysis, it is assumed that all vegetable crop production will be sold on the Honolulu market. This market restriction is imposed because producers will not export until the Honolulu market price falls to a point Where export offers the most profitable outlet. This price would probably be somewhat lower than the West Coast price less transportation charges. Available information suggests that under prevailing management practices, which are assumed, this price would not be sufficient to cover production costs (39; 49, p. 11). The estimating model is an iterative linear programming system that allows for adjustments in supply from existing producers as price changes and does not permit production to exceed quantity demanded at any given price. This model constructs a static equilibrium for a specified number of crops while allowing them to compete with one another for scarce resources as they would in the market. The scarce resources are allocated to their most profitable use

Farm cooperatives can merge : an Oregon study

Published September 1960. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalo