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

Political Islam and Non-Muslim Religions - A Lesson from Lessing for the Arab Transition

Hardly any region has recently captured the global geopolitical imagination as much as the Arab world after the so-called Arab Spring and very likely no state more so than Egypt. Finally it seemed that democracy was coming to the region, that this would spell the end of radical Islam, and of any local aspirations of creating Islamic states, and mark the beginning of a rapprochement between East and West. This article analyses and links those dynamics, with particular reference to the transition process in the wake of the so-called Arab Revolution, and gauges what may be at stake for members of non-Muslim faiths. It particularly traces the rift between theoretical Muslim discourse about Islamic tolerance towards other faiths and its implementation or the absence thereof in practice. It concludes that so far no real progress has been made and that, for the relationship to evolve, Islam needs to proceed to a state in which it sees itself as no more than an equal to other religions. The recognition of its tradition-based nature and of the consequences that flow from such a realization for the treatment of its fundamental sources, the Qur'an and the Sunna, will be addressed. To evaluate the current situation and the outlook, we shall use the example of the famous eighteenth-century German play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, about the occupation of Jerusalem by Saladin