Evaluation of attention-based LSTM and Bi-LSTM networks for abstract text classification in systematic literature review automation.

Systematic Review (SR) presents the highest form of evidence in research for decision and policy-making. Nonetheless, the structured steps involved in carrying out SRs make it demanding for reviewers. Many studies have projected the abstract screening stage in the SR process to be the most burdensome for reviewers, thus automating this stage with artificial intelligence (AI). However, majority of these studies focus on using traditional machine learning classifiers for the abstract classification. Thus, there remain a gap to explore the potential of deep learning techniques for this task. This study seeks to bridge the gap by exploring how LSTM and Bi-LSTM models together with GloVe for vectorisation can accelerate this stage. As a further aim to increase precision while sustaining a recall >= 95% due to precision-recall trade-off, attention mechanics is added to these classifiers. The final experimental results obtained showed that Bi-LSTM with attention has the capacity to expedite citation screening