Cecile Paris

Shuzhi Gong, Richard O. Sinnott, Jianzhong Qi et al.

The popularity of online social networks has enabled rapid dissemination of information. People now can share and consume information much more rapidly than ever before. However, low-quality and/or accidentally/deliberately fake information can also spread rapidly. This can lead to considerable and negative impacts on society. Identifying, labelling and debunking online misinformation as early as possible has become an increasingly urgent problem. Many methods have been proposed to detect fake news including many deep learning and graph-based approaches. In recent years, graph-based methods have yielded strong results, as they can closely model the social context and propagation process of online news. In this paper, we present a systematic review of fake news detection studies based on graph-based and deep learning-based techniques. We classify existing graph-based methods into knowledge-driven methods, propagation-based methods, and heterogeneous social context-based methods, depending on how a graph structure is constructed to model news related information flows. We further discuss the challenges and open problems in graph-based fake news detection and identify future research directions.

Hy Nguyen, Xuefei He, Andrew Reeson et al.

Large language models are able to generate code for visualisations in response to simple user requests. This is a useful application and an appealing one for NLP research because plots of data provide grounding for language. However, there are relatively few benchmarks, and those that exist may not be representative of what users do in practice. This paper investigates whether benchmarks reflect real-world use through an empirical study comparing benchmark datasets with code from public repositories. Our findings reveal a substantial gap, with evaluations not testing the same distribution of chart types, attributes, and actions as real-world examples. One dataset is representative, but requires extensive modification to become a practical end-to-end benchmark. This shows that new benchmarks are needed to support the development of systems that truly address users' visualisation needs. These observations will guide future data creation, highlighting which features hold genuine significance for users.

Hashini Senaratne, Richard Attfield, Samith Widhanapathirana et al.

Maintaining situational awareness (SA) is critical in human-robot teams. Yet, under high workload and dynamic conditions, operators often experience SA gaps. Automated detection of SA gaps could provide timely assistance for operators. However, conventional SA measures either disrupt task flow or cannot capture real-time fluctuations, limiting their operational utility. To the best of our knowledge, no publicly available dataset currently supports the systematic evaluation of online human SA assessment in human-robot teaming. To advance the development of online SA assessment tools, we introduce HRI-SA, a multimodal dataset from 30 participants in a realistic search-and-rescue human-robot teaming context, incorporating eye movements, pupil diameter, biosignals, user interactions, and robot data. The experimental protocol included predefined events requiring timely operator assistance, with ground truth SA latency of two types (perceptual and comprehension) systematically obtained by measuring the time between assistance need onset and resolution. We illustrate the utility of this dataset by evaluating standard machine learning models for detecting perceptual SA latencies using generic eye-tracking features and contextual features. Results show that eye-tracking features alone effectively classified perceptual SA latency (recall=88.91%, F1=67.63%) using leave-one-group-out cross-validation, with performance improved through contextual data fusion (recall=91.51%, F1=80.38%). This paper contributes the first public dataset supporting the systematic evaluation of SA throughout a human-robot teaming mission, while also demonstrating the potential of generic eye-tracking features for continuous perceptual SA latency detection in remote human-robot teaming.

Xing Su, Shan Xue, Fanzhen Liu et al.

A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.

Shuzhi Gong, Richard Sinnott, Jianzhong Qi et al.

The widespread dissemination of fake news on social media poses significant risks, necessitating timely and accurate detection. However, existing methods struggle with unseen news due to their reliance on training data from past events and domains, leaving the challenge of detecting novel fake news largely unresolved. To address this, we identify biases in training data tied to specific domains and propose a debiasing solution FNDCD. Originating from causal analysis, FNDCD employs a reweighting strategy based on classification confidence and propagation structure regularization to reduce the influence of domain-specific biases, enhancing the detection of unseen fake news. Experiments on real-world datasets with non-overlapping news domains demonstrate FNDCD's effectiveness in improving generalization across domains.

Fanzhen Liu, Alsharif Abuadbba, Kristen Moore et al.

In an era where misinformation spreads freely, fact-checking (FC) plays a crucial role in verifying claims and promoting reliable information. While automated fact-checking (AFC) has advanced significantly, existing systems remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that manipulate or generate claims, evidence, or claim-evidence pairs. These attacks can distort the truth, mislead decision-makers, and ultimately undermine the reliability of FC models. Despite growing research interest in adversarial attacks against AFC systems, a comprehensive, holistic overview of key challenges remains lacking. These challenges include understanding attack strategies, assessing the resilience of current models, and identifying ways to enhance robustness. This survey provides the first in-depth review of adversarial attacks targeting FC, categorizing existing attack methodologies and evaluating their impact on AFC systems. Additionally, we examine recent advancements in adversary-aware defenses and highlight open research questions that require further exploration. Our findings underscore the urgent need for resilient FC frameworks capable of withstanding adversarial manipulations in pursuit of preserving high verification accuracy.

Fanzhen Liu, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jian Yang et al.

Enhancing the interpretability of graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial to ensure their safe and fair deployment. Recent work has introduced self-explainable GNNs that generate explanations as part of training, improving both faithfulness and efficiency. Some of these models, such as ProtGNN and PGIB, learn class-specific prototypes, offering a potential pathway toward class-level explanations. However, their evaluations focus solely on instance-level explanations, leaving open the question of whether these prototypes meaningfully generalize across instances of the same class. In this paper, we introduce GraphOracle, a novel self-explainable GNN framework designed to generate and evaluate class-level explanations for GNNs. Our model jointly learns a GNN classifier and a set of structured, sparse subgraphs that are discriminative for each class. We propose a novel integrated training that captures graph$\unicode{x2013}$subgraph$\unicode{x2013}$prediction dependencies efficiently and faithfully, validated through a masking-based evaluation strategy. This strategy enables us to retroactively assess whether prior methods like ProtGNN and PGIB deliver effective class-level explanations. Our results show that they do not. In contrast, GraphOracle achieves superior fidelity, explainability, and scalability across a range of graph classification tasks. We further demonstrate that GraphOracle avoids the computational bottlenecks of previous methods$\unicode{x2014}$like Monte Carlo Tree Search$\unicode{x2014}$by using entropy-regularized subgraph selection and lightweight random walk extraction, enabling faster and more scalable training. These findings position GraphOracle as a practical and principled solution for faithful class-level self-explainability in GNNs.

Abhinav Sood, Kazjon Grace, Stephen Wan et al.

Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive reasoning is discussed in epistemology, science and design, and then analyses how various computational systems use abductive reasoning. Our analysis shows that neither theoretical accounts nor computational implementations of abductive reasoning adequately address generating creative hypotheses. Theoretical frameworks do not provide a straightforward model for generating creative abductive hypotheses, computational systems largely implement syllogistic forms of abductive reasoning. We break down abductive computational systems into components and conclude by identifying specific directions for future research that could advance the state of creative abductive reasoning in computational systems.

Melanie McGrath, Harrison Bailey, Necva Bölücü et al.

Information extraction from the scientific literature is one of the main techniques to transform unstructured knowledge hidden in the text into structured data which can then be used for decision-making in down-stream tasks. One such area is Trust in AI, where factors contributing to human trust in artificial intelligence applications are studied. The relationships of these factors with human trust in such applications are complex. We hence explore this space from the lens of information extraction where, with the input of domain experts, we carefully design annotation guidelines, create the first annotated English dataset in this domain, investigate an LLM-guided annotation, and benchmark it with state-of-the-art methods using large language models in named entity and relation extraction. Our results indicate that this problem requires supervised learning which may not be currently feasible with prompt-based LLMs.

Shuzhi Gong, Richard O. Sinnott, Jianzhong Qi et al.

The spread of fake news on social media poses significant threats to individuals and society. Text-based and graph-based models have been employed for fake news detection by analysing news content and propagation networks, showing promising results in specific scenarios. However, these data-driven models heavily rely on pre-existing in-distribution data for training, limiting their performance when confronted with fake news from emerging or previously unseen domains, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Tackling OOD fake news is a challenging yet critical task. In this paper, we introduce the Causal Subgraph-oriented Domain Adaptive Fake News Detection (CSDA) model, designed to enhance zero-shot fake news detection by extracting causal substructures from propagation graphs using in-distribution data and generalising this approach to OOD data. The model employs a graph neural network based mask generation process to identify dominant nodes and edges within the propagation graph, using these substructures for fake news detection. Additionally, the performance of CSDA is further improved through contrastive learning in few-shot scenarios, where a limited amount of OOD data is available for training. Extensive experiments on public social media datasets demonstrate that CSDA effectively handles OOD fake news detection, achieving a 7 to 16 percents accuracy improvement over other state-of-the-art models.

Shahroz Tariq, Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, Surya Nepal et al.

This paper introduces A2C, a multi-stage collaborative decision framework designed to enable robust decision-making within human-AI teams. Drawing inspiration from concepts such as rejection learning and learning to defer, A2C incorporates AI systems trained to recognise uncertainty in their decisions and defer to human experts when needed. Moreover, A2C caters to scenarios where even human experts encounter limitations, such as in incident detection and response in cyber Security Operations Centres (SOC). In such scenarios, A2C facilitates collaborative explorations, enabling collective resolution of complex challenges. With support for three distinct decision-making modes in human-AI teams: Automated, Augmented, and Collaborative, A2C offers a flexible platform for developing effective strategies for human-AI collaboration. By harnessing the strengths of both humans and AI, it significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of complex decision-making in dynamic and evolving environments. To validate A2C's capabilities, we conducted extensive simulative experiments using benchmark datasets. The results clearly demonstrate that all three modes of decision-making can be effectively supported by A2C. Most notably, collaborative exploration by (simulated) human experts and AI achieves superior performance compared to AI in isolation, underscoring the framework's potential to enhance decision-making within human-AI teams.

Xiang Dai, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ben Hachey et al.

Recent studies on domain-specific BERT models show that effectiveness on downstream tasks can be improved when models are pretrained on in-domain data. Often, the pretraining data used in these models are selected based on their subject matter, e.g., biology or computer science. Given the range of applications using social media text, and its unique language variety, we pretrain two models on tweets and forum text respectively, and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of these two resources. In addition, we investigate how similarity measures can be used to nominate in-domain pretraining data. We publicly release our pretrained models at https://bit.ly/35RpTf0.

Shiwei Zhang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Jey Han Lau et al.

Promptly and accurately answering questions on products is important for e-commerce applications. Manually answering product questions (e.g. on community question answering platforms) results in slow response and does not scale. Recent studies show that product reviews are a good source for real-time, automatic product question answering (PQA). In the literature, PQA is formulated as a retrieval problem with the goal to search for the most relevant reviews to answer a given product question. In this paper, we focus on the issue of answerability and answer reliability for PQA using reviews. Our investigation is based on the intuition that many questions may not be answerable with a finite set of reviews. When a question is not answerable, a system should return nil answers rather than providing a list of irrelevant reviews, which can have significant negative impact on user experience. Moreover, for answerable questions, only the most relevant reviews that answer the question should be included in the result. We propose a conformal prediction based framework to improve the reliability of PQA systems, where we reject unreliable answers so that the returned results are more concise and accurate at answering the product question, including returning nil answers for unanswerable questions. Experiments on a widely used Amazon dataset show encouraging results of our proposed framework. More broadly, our results demonstrate a novel and effective application of conformal methods to a retrieval task.

Tingmin Wu, Wanlun Ma, Sheng Wen et al.

Computer users are generally faced with difficulties in making correct security decisions. While an increasingly fewer number of people are trying or willing to take formal security training, online sources including news, security blogs, and websites are continuously making security knowledge more accessible. Analysis of cybersecurity texts can provide insights into the trending topics and identify current security issues as well as how cyber attacks evolve over time. These in turn can support researchers and practitioners in predicting and preparing for these attacks. Comparing different sources may facilitate the learning process for normal users by persisting the security knowledge gained from different cybersecurity context. Prior studies neither systematically analysed the wide-range of digital sources nor provided any standardisation in analysing the trending topics from recent security texts. Although LDA has been widely adopted in topic generation, its generated topics cannot cover the cybersecurity concepts completely and considerably overlap. To address this issue, we propose a semi-automated classification method to generate comprehensive security categories instead of LDA-generated topics. We further compare the identified 16 security categories across different sources based on their popularity and impact. We have revealed several surprising findings. (1) The impact reflected from cyber-security texts strongly correlates with the monetary loss caused by cybercrimes. (2) For most categories, security blogs share the largest popularity and largest absolute/relative impact over time. (3) Websites deliver security information without caring about timeliness much, where one third of the articles do not specify the date and the rest have a time lag in posting emerging security issues.

Fanzhen Liu, Shan Xue, Jia Wu et al.

As communities represent similar opinions, similar functions, similar purposes, etc., community detection is an important and extremely useful tool in both scientific inquiry and data analytics. However, the classic methods of community detection, such as spectral clustering and statistical inference, are falling by the wayside as deep learning techniques demonstrate an increasing capacity to handle high-dimensional graph data with impressive performance. Thus, a survey of current progress in community detection through deep learning is timely. Structured into three broad research streams in this domain - deep neural networks, deep graph embedding, and graph neural networks, this article summarizes the contributions of the various frameworks, models, and algorithms in each stream along with the current challenges that remain unsolved and the future research opportunities yet to be explored.

Xiang Dai, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ben Hachey et al.

Unlike widely used Named Entity Recognition (NER) data sets in generic domains, biomedical NER data sets often contain mentions consisting of discontinuous spans. Conventional sequence tagging techniques encode Markov assumptions that are efficient but preclude recovery of these mentions. We propose a simple, effective transition-based model with generic neural encoding for discontinuous NER. Through extensive experiments on three biomedical data sets, we show that our model can effectively recognize discontinuous mentions without sacrificing the accuracy on continuous mentions.

Chang Xu, Cecile Paris, Surya Nepal et al.

We address the issue of having a limited number of annotations for stance classification in a new domain, by adapting out-of-domain classifiers with domain adaptation. Existing approaches often align different domains in a single, global feature space (or view), which may fail to fully capture the richness of the languages used for expressing stances, leading to reduced adaptability on stance data. In this paper, we identify two major types of stance expressions that are linguistically distinct, and we propose a tailored dual-view adaptation network (DAN) to adapt these expressions across domains. The proposed model first learns a separate view for domain transfer in each expression channel and then selects the best adapted parts of both views for optimal transfer. We find that the learned view features can be more easily aligned and more stance-discriminative in either or both views, leading to more transferable overall features after combining the views. Results from extensive experiments show that our method can enhance the state-of-the-art single-view methods in matching stance data across different domains, and that it consistently improves those methods on various adaptation tasks.

Omid Mohamad Nezami, Mark Dras, Stephen Wan et al.

While most image captioning aims to generate objective descriptions of images, the last few years have seen work on generating visually grounded image captions which have a specific style (e.g., incorporating positive or negative sentiment). However, because the stylistic component is typically the last part of training, current models usually pay more attention to the style at the expense of accurate content description. In addition, there is a lack of variability in terms of the stylistic aspects. To address these issues, we propose an image captioning model called ATTEND-GAN which has two core components: first, an attention-based caption generator to strongly correlate different parts of an image with different parts of a caption; and second, an adversarial training mechanism to assist the caption generator to add diverse stylistic components to the generated captions. Because of these components, ATTEND-GAN can generate correlated captions as well as more human-like variability of stylistic patterns. Our system outperforms the state-of-the-art as well as a collection of our baseline models. A linguistic analysis of the generated captions demonstrates that captions generated using ATTEND-GAN have a wider range of stylistic adjectives and adjective-noun pairs.

Omid Mohamad Nezami, Mark Dras, Stephen Wan et al.

Benefiting from advances in machine vision and natural language processing techniques, current image captioning systems are able to generate detailed visual descriptions. For the most part, these descriptions represent an objective characterisation of the image, although some models do incorporate subjective aspects related to the observer's view of the image, such as sentiment; current models, however, usually do not consider the emotional content of images during the caption generation process. This paper addresses this issue by proposing novel image captioning models which use facial expression features to generate image captions. The models generate image captions using long short-term memory networks applying facial features in addition to other visual features at different time steps. We compare a comprehensive collection of image captioning models with and without facial features using all standard evaluation metrics. The evaluation metrics indicate that applying facial features with an attention mechanism achieves the best performance, showing more expressive and more correlated image captions, on an image caption dataset extracted from the standard Flickr 30K dataset, consisting of around 11K images containing faces. An analysis of the generated captions finds that, perhaps unexpectedly, the improvement in caption quality appears to come not from the addition of adjectives linked to emotional aspects of the images, but from more variety in the actions described in the captions.

Aditya Joshi, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ross Sparks et al.

Distributed representations of text can be used as features when training a statistical classifier. These representations may be created as a composition of word vectors or as context-based sentence vectors. We compare the two kinds of representations (word versus context) for three classification problems: influenza infection classification, drug usage classification and personal health mention classification. For statistical classifiers trained for each of these problems, context-based representations based on ELMo, Universal Sentence Encoder, Neural-Net Language Model and FLAIR are better than Word2Vec, GloVe and the two adapted using the MESH ontology. There is an improvement of 2-4% in the accuracy when these context-based representations are used instead of word-based representations.

Adith Iyer, Aditya Joshi, Sarvnaz Karimi et al.

Personal health mention detection deals with predicting whether or not a given sentence is a report of a health condition. Past work mentions errors in this prediction when symptom words, i.e. names of symptoms of interest, are used in a figurative sense. Therefore, we combine a state-of-the-art figurative usage detection with CNN-based personal health mention detection. To do so, we present two methods: a pipeline-based approach and a feature augmentation-based approach. The introduction of figurative usage detection results in an average improvement of 2.21% F-score of personal health mention detection, in the case of the feature augmentation-based approach. This paper demonstrates the promise of using figurative usage detection to improve personal health mention detection.

Chang Xu, Cecile Paris, Surya Nepal et al.

We identify agreement and disagreement between utterances that express stances towards a topic of discussion. Existing methods focus mainly on conversational settings, where dialogic features are used for (dis)agreement inference. We extend this scope and seek to detect stance (dis)agreement in a broader setting, where independent stance-bearing utterances, which prevail in many stance corpora and real-world scenarios, are compared. To cope with such non-dialogic utterances, we find that the reasons uttered to back up a specific stance can help predict stance (dis)agreements. We propose a reason comparing network (RCN) to leverage reason information for stance comparison. Empirical results on a well-known stance corpus show that our method can discover useful reason information, enabling it to outperform several baselines in stance (dis)agreement detection.

Nicky Ringland, Xiang Dai, Ben Hachey et al.

Named entity recognition (NER) is widely used in natural language processing applications and downstream tasks. However, most NER tools target flat annotation from popular datasets, eschewing the semantic information available in nested entity mentions. We describe NNE---a fine-grained, nested named entity dataset over the full Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank (PTB). Our annotation comprises 279,795 mentions of 114 entity types with up to 6 layers of nesting. We hope the public release of this large dataset for English newswire will encourage development of new techniques for nested NER.

Xiang Dai, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ben Hachey et al.

Word vectors and Language Models (LMs) pretrained on a large amount of unlabelled data can dramatically improve various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the measure and impact of similarity between pretraining data and target task data are left to intuition. We propose three cost-effective measures to quantify different aspects of similarity between source pretraining and target task data. We demonstrate that these measures are good predictors of the usefulness of pretrained models for Named Entity Recognition (NER) over 30 data pairs. Results also suggest that pretrained LMs are more effective and more predictable than pretrained word vectors, but pretrained word vectors are better when pretraining data is dissimilar.

Aditya Joshi, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ross Sparks et al.

Epidemic intelligence deals with the detection of disease outbreaks using formal (such as hospital records) and informal sources (such as user-generated text on the web) of information. In this survey, we discuss approaches for epidemic intelligence that use textual datasets, referring to it as `text-based epidemic intelligence'. We view past work in terms of two broad categories: health mention classification (selecting relevant text from a large volume) and health event detection (predicting epidemic events from a collection of relevant text). The focus of our discussion is the underlying computational linguistic techniques in the two categories. The survey also provides details of the state-of-the-art in annotation techniques, resources and evaluation strategies for epidemic intelligence.

Omid Mohamad Nezami, Mark Dras, Stephen Wan et al.

There has been much recent work on image captioning models that describe the factual aspects of an image. Recently, some models have incorporated non-factual aspects into the captions, such as sentiment or style. However, such models typically have difficulty in balancing the semantic aspects of the image and the non-factual dimensions of the caption; in addition, it can be observed that humans may focus on different aspects of an image depending on the chosen sentiment or style of the caption. To address this, we design an attention-based model to better add sentiment to image captions. The model embeds and learns sentiment with respect to image-caption data, and uses both high-level and word-level sentiment information during the learning process. The model outperforms the state-of-the-art work in image captioning with sentiment using standard evaluation metrics. An analysis of generated captions also shows that our model does this by a better selection of the sentiment-bearing adjectives and adjective-noun pairs.

Omid Mohamad Nezami, Mark Dras, Len Hamey et al.

Engagement is a key indicator of the quality of learning experience, and one that plays a major role in developing intelligent educational interfaces. Any such interface requires the ability to recognise the level of engagement in order to respond appropriately; however, there is very little existing data to learn from, and new data is expensive and difficult to acquire. This paper presents a deep learning model to improve engagement recognition from images that overcomes the data sparsity challenge by pre-training on readily available basic facial expression data, before training on specialised engagement data. In the first of two steps, a facial expression recognition model is trained to provide a rich face representation using deep learning. In the second step, we use the model's weights to initialize our deep learning based model to recognize engagement; we term this the engagement model. We train the model on our new engagement recognition dataset with 4627 engaged and disengaged samples. We find that the engagement model outperforms effective deep learning architectures that we apply for the first time to engagement recognition, as well as approaches using histogram of oriented gradients and support vector machines.

Tingmin Wu, Lihong Tang, Rongjunchen Zhang et al.

Android users are increasingly concerned with the privacy of their data and security of their devices. To improve the security awareness of users, recent automatic techniques produce security-centric descriptions by performing program analysis. However, the generated text does not always address users' concerns as they are generally too technical to be understood by ordinary users. Moreover, different users have varied linguistic preferences, which do not match the text. Motivated by this challenge, we develop an innovative scheme to help users avoid malware and privacy-breaching apps by generating security descriptions that explain the privacy and security related aspects of an Android app in clear and understandable terms. We implement a prototype system, PERSCRIPTION, to generate personalised security-centric descriptions that automatically learn users' security concerns and linguistic preferences to produce user-oriented descriptions. We evaluate our scheme through experiments and user studies. The results clearly demonstrate the improvement on readability and users' security awareness of PERSCRIPTION's descriptions compared to existing description generators.

Chang Xu, Cecile Paris, Surya Nepal et al.

In stance classification, the target on which the stance is made defines the boundary of the task, and a classifier is usually trained for prediction on the same target. In this work, we explore the potential for generalizing classifiers between different targets, and propose a neural model that can apply what has been learned from a source target to a destination target. We show that our model can find useful information shared between relevant targets which improves generalization in certain scenarios.

Vincent Nguyen, Sarvnaz Karimi, Sara Falamaki et al.

Finding relevant literature underpins the practice of evidence-based medicine. From 2014 to 2016, TREC conducted a clinical decision support track, wherein participants were tasked with finding articles relevant to clinical questions posed by physicians. In total, 87 teams have participated over the past three years, generating 395 runs. During this period, each team has trialled a variety of methods. While there was significant overlap in the methods employed by different teams, the results were varied. Due to the diversity of the platforms used, the results arising from the different techniques are not directly comparable, reducing the ability to build on previous work. By using a stable platform, we have been able to compare different document and query processing techniques, allowing us to experiment with different search parameters. We have used our system to reproduce leading teams runs, and compare the results obtained. By benchmarking our indexing and search techniques, we can statistically test a variety of hypotheses, paving the way for further research.

Abeed Sarker, Diego Molla, Cecile Paris

The practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) urges medical practitioners to utilise the latest research evidence when making clinical decisions. Because of the massive and growing volume of published research on various medical topics, practitioners often find themselves overloaded with information. As such, natural language processing research has recently commenced exploring techniques for performing medical domain-specific automated text summarisation (ATS) techniques-- targeted towards the task of condensing large medical texts. However, the development of effective summarisation techniques for this task requires cross-domain knowledge. We present a survey of EBM, the domain-specific needs for EBM, automated summarisation techniques, and how they have been applied hitherto. We envision that this survey will serve as a first resource for the development of future operational text summarisation techniques for EBM.