Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search


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Brown P., Kurdak H., Zhou Y.

DATABASE: THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL DATABASES AND CURATION, sa.baz085, ss.1-67, 2019 (SCI-Expanded) identifier

Özet

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 science.