Overview of the SV-Ident 2022 Shared Task on Survey Variable Identification in Social Science PublicationsTornike Tsereteli, Yavuz Selim Kartal, Simone Paolo Ponzetto et al.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the SV-Ident shared task as part of the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING 2022. In the shared task, participants were provided with a sentence and a vocabulary of variables, and asked to identify which variables, if any, are mentioned in individual sentences from scholarly documents in full text. Two teams made a total of 9 submissions to the shared task leaderboard. While none of the teams improve on the baseline systems, we still draw insights from their submissions. Furthermore, we provide a detailed evaluation. Data and baselines for our shared task are freely available at https://github.com/vadis-project/sv-ident
Which Factors are associated with Open Access Publishing? A Springer Nature Case StudyFakhri Momeni, Stefan Dietze, Philipp Mayr et al.
Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than others. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show that the countries' income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications are the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.
2.3DLOct 18, 2022
A Comprehensive Analysis of Acknowledgement Texts in Web of Science: a case study on four scientific domainsNina Smirnova, Philipp Mayr
Analysis of acknowledgments is particularly interesting as acknowledgments may give information not only about funding, but they are also able to reveal hidden contributions to authorship and the researcher's collaboration patterns, context in which research was conducted, and specific aspects of the academic work. The focus of the present research is the analysis of a large sample of acknowledgement texts indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. Record types 'article' and 'review' from four different scientific domains, namely social sciences, economics, oceanography and computer science, published from 2014 to 2019 in a scientific journal in English were considered. Six types of acknowledged entities, i.e., funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation and miscellaneous, were extracted from the acknowledgement texts using a Named Entity Recognition (NER) tagger and subsequently examined. A general analysis of the acknowledgement texts showed that indexing of funding information in WoS is incomplete. The analysis of the automatically extracted entities revealed differences and distinct patterns in the distribution of acknowledged entities of different types between different scientific domains. A strong association was found between acknowledged entity and scientific domain and acknowledged entity and entity type. Only negligible correlation was found between the number of citations and the number of acknowledged entities. Generally, the number of words in the acknowledgement texts positively correlates with the number of acknowledged funding organizations, universities, individuals and miscellaneous entities. At the same time, acknowledgement texts with the larger number of sentences have more acknowledged individuals and miscellaneous categories.
Embedding Models for Supervised Automatic Extraction and Classification of Named Entities in Scientific AcknowledgementsNina Smirnova, Philipp Mayr
Acknowledgments in scientific papers may give an insight into aspects of the scientific community, such as reward systems, collaboration patterns, and hidden research trends. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the performance of different embedding models for the task of automatic extraction and classification of acknowledged entities from the acknowledgment text in scientific papers. We trained and implemented a named entity recognition (NER) task using the Flair NLP framework. The training was conducted using three default Flair NER models with four differently-sized corpora and different versions of the Flair NLP framework. The Flair Embeddings model trained on the medium corpus with the latest FLAIR version showed the best accuracy of 0.79. Expanding the size of a training corpus from very small to medium size massively increased the accuracy of all training algorithms, but further expansion of the training corpus did not bring further improvement. Moreover, the performance of the model slightly deteriorated. Our model is able to recognize six entity types: funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation, and miscellaneous. The model works more precisely for some entity types than for others; thus, individuals and grant numbers showed a very good F1-Score over 0.9. Most of the previous works on acknowledgment analysis were limited by the manual evaluation of data and therefore by the amount of processed data. This model can be applied for the comprehensive analysis of acknowledgment texts and may potentially make a great contribution to the field of automated acknowledgment analysis.
0.9CLJul 26, 2023
UnScientify: Detecting Scientific Uncertainty in Scholarly Full TextPanggih Kusuma Ningrum, Philipp Mayr, Iana Atanassova
This demo paper presents UnScientify, an interactive system designed to detect scientific uncertainty in scholarly full text. The system utilizes a weakly supervised technique that employs a fine-grained annotation scheme to identify verbally formulated uncertainty at the sentence level in scientific texts. The pipeline for the system includes a combination of pattern matching, complex sentence checking, and authorial reference checking. Our approach automates labeling and annotation tasks for scientific uncertainty identification, taking into account different types of scientific uncertainty, that can serve various applications such as information retrieval, text mining, and scholarly document processing. Additionally, UnScientify provides interpretable results, aiding in the comprehension of identified instances of scientific uncertainty in text.
1.1CLJun 22, 2022
Evaluation of Embedding Models for Automatic Extraction and Classification of Acknowledged Entities in Scientific DocumentsNina Smirnova, Philipp Mayr
Acknowledgments in scientific papers may give an insight into aspects of the scientific community, such as reward systems, collaboration patterns, and hidden research trends. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the performance of different embedding models for the task of automatic extraction and classification of acknowledged entities from the acknowledgment text in scientific papers. We trained and implemented a named entity recognition (NER) task using the Flair NLP-framework. The training was conducted using three default Flair NER models with two differently-sized corpora. The Flair Embeddings model trained on the larger training corpus showed the best accuracy of 0.77. Our model is able to recognize six entity types: funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation and miscellaneous. The model works more precise for some entity types than the others, thus, individuals and grant numbers showed very good F1-Score over 0.9. Most of the previous works on acknowledgement analysis were limited by the manual evaluation of data and therefore by the amount of processed data. This model can be applied for the comprehensive analysis of the acknowledgement texts and may potentially make a great contribution to the field of automated acknowledgement analysis.
1.0CLAug 24, 2024
Utilizing Large Language Models for Named Entity Recognition in Traditional Chinese Medicine against COVID-19 Literature: Comparative StudyXu Tong, Nina Smirnova, Sharmila Upadhyaya et al.
Objective: To explore and compare the performance of ChatGPT and other state-of-the-art LLMs on domain-specific NER tasks covering different entity types and domains in TCM against COVID-19 literature. Methods: We established a dataset of 389 articles on TCM against COVID-19, and manually annotated 48 of them with 6 types of entities belonging to 3 domains as the ground truth, against which the NER performance of LLMs can be assessed. We then performed NER tasks for the 6 entity types using ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) and 4 state-of-the-art BERT-based question-answering (QA) models (RoBERTa, MiniLM, PubMedBERT and SciBERT) without prior training on the specific task. A domain fine-tuned model (GSAP-NER) was also applied for a comprehensive comparison. Results: The overall performance of LLMs varied significantly in exact match and fuzzy match. In the fuzzy match, ChatGPT surpassed BERT-based QA models in 5 out of 6 tasks, while in exact match, BERT-based QA models outperformed ChatGPT in 5 out of 6 tasks but with a smaller F-1 difference. GPT-4 showed a significant advantage over other models in fuzzy match, especially on the entity type of TCM formula and the Chinese patent drug (TFD) and ingredient (IG). Although GPT-4 outperformed BERT-based models on entity type of herb, target, and research method, none of the F-1 scores exceeded 0.5. GSAP-NER, outperformed GPT-4 in terms of F-1 by a slight margin on RM. ChatGPT achieved considerably higher recalls than precisions, particularly in the fuzzy match. Conclusions: The NER performance of LLMs is highly dependent on the entity type, and their performance varies across application scenarios. ChatGPT could be a good choice for scenarios where high recall is favored. However, for knowledge acquisition in rigorous scenarios, neither ChatGPT nor BERT-based QA models are off-the-shelf tools for professional practitioners.
6.7CLMar 14, 2025
Annotating Scientific Uncertainty: A comprehensive model using linguistic patterns and comparison with existing approachesPanggih Kusuma Ningrum, Philipp Mayr, Nina Smirnova et al.
UnScientify, a system designed to detect scientific uncertainty in scholarly full text. The system utilizes a weakly supervised technique to identify verbally expressed uncertainty in scientific texts and their authorial references. The core methodology of UnScientify is based on a multi-faceted pipeline that integrates span pattern matching, complex sentence analysis and author reference checking. This approach streamlines the labeling and annotation processes essential for identifying scientific uncertainty, covering a variety of uncertainty expression types to support diverse applications including information retrieval, text mining and scientific document processing. The evaluation results highlight the trade-offs between modern large language models (LLMs) and the UnScientify system. UnScientify, which employs more traditional techniques, achieved superior performance in the scientific uncertainty detection task, attaining an accuracy score of 0.808. This finding underscores the continued relevance and efficiency of UnScientify's simple rule-based and pattern matching strategy for this specific application. The results demonstrate that in scenarios where resource efficiency, interpretability, and domain-specific adaptability are critical, traditional methods can still offer significant advantages.
2.7CLSep 26, 2025
NFDI4DS Shared Tasks for Scholarly Document ProcessingRaia Abu Ahmad, Rana Abdulla, Tilahun Abedissa Taffa et al.
Shared tasks are powerful tools for advancing research through community-based standardised evaluation. As such, they play a key role in promoting findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), as well as transparent and reproducible research practices. This paper presents an updated overview of twelve shared tasks developed and hosted under the German National Research Data Infrastructure for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (NFDI4DS) consortium, covering a diverse set of challenges in scholarly document processing. Hosted at leading venues, the tasks foster methodological innovations and contribute open-access datasets, models, and tools for the broader research community, which are integrated into the consortium's research data infrastructure.
3.3DLJun 23, 2021
BiblioDAP: The 1st Workshop on Bibliographic Data Analysis and ProcessingZeyd Boukhers, Philipp Mayr, Silvio Peroni
Automatic processing of bibliographic data becomes very important in digital libraries, data science and machine learning due to its importance in keeping pace with the significant increase of published papers every year from one side and to the inherent challenges from the other side. This processing has several aspects including but not limited to I) Automatic extraction of references from PDF documents, II) Building an accurate citation graph, III) Author name disambiguation, etc. Bibliographic data is heterogeneous by nature and occurs in both structured (e.g. citation graph) and unstructured (e.g. publications) formats. Therefore, it requires data science and machine learning techniques to be processed and analysed. Here we introduce BiblioDAP'21: The 1st Workshop on Bibliographic Data Analysis and Processing.
1.2DLJun 8, 2021
ConSTR: A Contextual Search Term RecommenderThomas Krämer, Zeljko Carevic, Dwaipayan Roy et al.
In this demo paper, we present ConSTR, a novel Contextual Search Term Recommender that utilises the user's interaction context for search term recommendation and literature retrieval. ConSTR integrates a two-layered recommendation interface: the first layer suggests terms with respect to a user's current search term, and the second layer suggests terms based on the users' previous search activities (interaction context). For the demonstration, ConSTR is built on the arXiv, an academic repository consisting of 1.8 million documents.
3.0IRMay 14, 2020
ECIR 2020 Workshops: Assessing the Impact of Going OnlineSérgio Nunes, Suzanne Little, Sumit Bhatia et al.
ECIR 2020 https://ecir2020.org/ was one of the many conferences affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Conference Chairs decided to keep the initially planned dates (April 14-17, 2020) and move to a fully online event. In this report, we describe the experience of organizing the ECIR 2020 Workshops in this scenario from two perspectives: the workshop organizers and the workshop participants. We provide a report on the organizational aspect of these events and the consequences for participants. Covering the scientific dimension of each workshop is outside the scope of this article.
1.7IRSep 11, 2019
Report on the 8th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2019)Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr
The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR tackled issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerx, DocEar) and the industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar). This report presents the 8th iteration of the one-day BIR workshop held at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany.
2.3DLJun 11, 2019
EXmatcher: Combining Features Based on Reference Strings and Segments to Enhance Citation MatchingBehnam Ghavimi, Wolfgang Otto, Philipp Mayr
Citation matching is a challenging task due to different problems such as the variety of citation styles, mistakes in reference strings and the quality of identified reference segments. The classic citation matching configuration used in this paper is the combination of blocking technique and a binary classifier. Three different possible inputs (reference strings, reference segments and a combination of reference strings and segments) were tested to find the most efficient strategy for citation matching. In the classification step, we describe the effect which the probabilities of reference segments can have in citation matching. Our evaluation on a manually curated gold standard showed that the input data consisting of the combination of reference segments and reference strings lead to the best result. In addition, the usage of the probabilities of the segmentation slightly improves the result.
1.7IRDec 3, 2018
Automatically Annotating Articles Towards Opening and Reusing Transparent Peer ReviewsAfshin Sadeghi, Sarven Capadisli, Johannes Wilm et al.
An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these. Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed. This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews. While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce. We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of interest. The fine-grained article structure is not only exposed to authors and reviewers but also preserved in the published version. We publish articles and their reviews in a Linked Data representation and thus maximize their reusability by third-party applications. We demonstrate this reusability by running quality-related queries against the structured representation of articles and their reviews.
1.7IRDec 2, 2018
Report on the 3rd Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries (BIRNDL 2018)Philipp Mayr, Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran, Kokil Jaidka
The $3^{rd}$ joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 41st ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018) in Ann Arbor, USA. BIRNDL 2018 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated three paper sessions and the $4^{th}$ edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task.
3.2IRSep 7, 2018
Data Requirements for Evaluation of Personalization of Information Retrieval - A Position PaperNicholas J. Belkin, Daniel Hienert, Philipp Mayr et al.
Two key, but usually ignored, issues for the evaluation of methods of personalization for information retrieval are: that such evaluation must be of a search session as a whole; and, that people, during the course of an information search session, engage in a variety of activities, intended to accomplish differ- ent goals or intentions. Taking serious account of these factors has major impli- cations for not only evaluation methods and metrics, but also for the nature of the data that is necessary both for understanding and modeling information search, and for evaluation of personalized support for information retrieval (IR). In this position paper, we: present a model of IR demonstrating why these fac- tors are important; identify some implications of accepting their validity; and, on the basis of a series of studies in interactive IR, identify some types of data concerning searcher and system behavior that we claim are, at least, necessary, if not necessarily sufficient, for meaningful evaluation of personalization of IR.
5.6IRAug 21, 2018
The Role of the Task Topic in Web Search of Different Task TypesDaniel Hienert, Matthew Mitsui, Philipp Mayr et al.
When users are looking for information on the Web, they show different behavior for different task types, e.g., for fact finding vs. information gathering tasks. For example, related work in this area has investigated how this behavior can be measured and applied to distinguish between easy and difficult tasks. In this work, we look at the searcher's behavior in the domain of journalism for four different task types, and additionally, for two different topics in each task type. Search behavior is measured with a number of session variables and correlated to subjective measures such as task difficulty, task success and the usefulness of documents. We acknowledge prior results in this area that task difficulty is correlated to user effort and that easy and difficult tasks are distinguishable by session variables. However, in this work, we emphasize the role of the task topic - in and of itself - over parameters such as the search results and read content pages, dwell times, session variables and subjective measures such as task difficulty or task success. With this knowledge researchers should give more attention to the task topic as an important influence factor for user behavior.
4.4IRApr 10, 2018
Report on the 7th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2018)Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac
The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop series has started at ECIR in 2014 and serves as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. This report presents all accepted papers at the 7th BIR workshop at ECIR 2018 in Grenoble, France.
2.2IROct 30, 2017
Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval: 5th International BIR WorkshopPhilipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshops serve as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. The workshop features original approaches to search, browse, and discover value-added knowledge from scientific documents and related information networks (e.g., terms, authors, institutions, references). We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. In this paper we introduce the BIR workshop series and discuss some selected papers presented at previous BIR workshops.
2.2IRJul 8, 2017
Analysis of Footnote Chasing and Citation Searching in an Academic Search EngineAmeni Kacem, Philipp Mayr
In interactive information retrieval, researchers consider the user behavior towards systems and search tasks in order to adapt search results by analyzing their past interactions. In this paper, we analyze the user behavior towards Marcia Bates' search stratagems such as 'footnote chasing' and 'citation search' in an academic search engine. We performed a preliminary analysis of their frequency and stage of use in the social sciences search engine sowiport. In addition, we explored the impact of these stratagems on the whole search process performance. We can conclude that the appearance of these two search features in real retrieval sessions lead to an improvement of the precision in terms of positive interactions with 16% when using footnote chasing and 17% for the citation search stratagem.
1.2DLJun 8, 2017
Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries (BIRNDL 2017)Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran, Kokil Jaidka, Philipp Mayr
The large scale of scholarly publications poses a challenge for scholars in information seeking and sensemaking. Bibliometrics, information retrieval (IR), text mining and NLP techniques could help in these search and look-up activities, but are not yet widely used. This workshop is intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, text mining and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The BIRNDL workshop at SIGIR 2017 will incorporate an invited talk, paper sessions and the third edition of the Computational Linguistics (CL) Scientific Summarization Shared Task.
2.7IRAug 29, 2016
Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval: Creating Knowledge through Research SynergiesJudit Bar-Ilan, Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang et al.
This panel brings together experts in bibliometrics and information retrieval to discuss how each of these two important areas of information science can help to inform the research of the other. There is a growing body of literature that capitalizes on the synergies created by combining methodological approaches of each to solve research problems and practical issues related to how information is created, stored, organized, retrieved and used. The session will begin with an overview of the common threads that exist between IR and metrics, followed by a summary of findings from the BIR workshops and examples of research projects that combine aspects of each area to benefit IR or metrics research areas, including search results ranking, semantic indexing and visualization. The panel will conclude with an engaging discussion with the audience to identify future areas of research and collaboration.
4.8IRJun 20, 2016
How Relevant is the Long Tail? A Relevance Assessment Study on Million ShortPhilipp Schaer, Philipp Mayr, Sebastian Sünkler et al.
Users of web search engines are known to mostly focus on the top ranked results of the search engine result page. While many studies support this well known information seeking pattern only few studies concentrate on the question what users are missing by neglecting lower ranked results. To learn more about the relevance distributions in the so-called long tail we conducted a relevance assessment study with the Million Short long-tail web search engine. While we see a clear difference in the content between the head and the tail of the search engine result list we see no statistical significant differences in the binary relevance judgments and weak significant differences when using graded relevance. The tail contains different but still valuable results. We argue that the long tail can be a rich source for the diversification of web search engine result lists but it needs more evaluation to clearly describe the differences.
4.3DLMar 6, 2016
Identifying and Improving Dataset References in Social Sciences Full TextsBehnam Ghavimi, Philipp Mayr, Sahar Vahdati et al.
Scientific full text papers are usually stored in separate places than their underlying research datasets. Authors typically make references to datasets by mentioning them for example by using their titles and the year of publication. However, in most cases explicit links that would provide readers with direct access to referenced datasets are missing. Manually detecting references to datasets in papers is time consuming and requires an expert in the domain of the paper. In order to make explicit all links to datasets in papers that have been published already, we suggest and evaluate a semi-automatic approach for finding references to datasets in social sciences papers. Our approach does not need a corpus of papers (no cold start problem) and it performs well on a small test corpus (gold standard). Our approach achieved an F-measure of 0.84 for identifying references in full texts and an F-measure of 0.83 for finding correct matches of detected references in the da|ra dataset registry.
5.6IROct 17, 2015
Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval: 3rd International BIR WorkshopPhilipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac
The BIR workshop brings together experts in Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval. While sometimes perceived as rather loosely related, these research areas share various interests and face similar challenges. Our motivation as organizers of the BIR workshop stemmed from a twofold observation. First, both communities only partly overlap, albeit sharing various interests. Second, it will be profitable for both sides to tackle some of the emerging problems that scholars face today when they have to identify relevant and high quality literature in the fast growing number of electronic publications available worldwide. Bibliometric techniques are not yet used widely to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. Information professionals working in libraries and archives, however, are increasingly confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. The first BIR workshop in 2014 set the research agenda by introducing each group to the other, illustrating state-of-the-art methods, reporting on current research problems, and brainstorming about common interests. The second workshop in 2015 further elaborated these themes. This third BIR workshop aims to foster a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into scholarly search engine interfaces. In particular we will address specific communities, as well as studies on large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley and ResearchGate. This third BIR workshop addresses explicitly both scholarly and industrial researchers.
1.1CLJun 17, 2015
Editorial for the First Workshop on Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and BibliometricsIana Atanassova, Marc Bertin, Philipp Mayr
The workshop "Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics" (CLBib 2015), co-located with the 15th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (ISSI 2015), brought together researchers in Bibliometrics and Computational Linguistics in order to study the ways Bibliometrics can benefit from large-scale text analytics and sense mining of scientific papers, thus exploring the interdisciplinarity of Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The goals of the workshop were to answer questions like: How can we enhance author network analysis and Bibliometrics using data obtained by text analytics? What insights can NLP provide on the structure of scientific writing, on citation networks, and on in-text citation analysis? This workshop is the first step to foster the reflection on the interdisciplinarity and the benefits that the two disciplines Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing can drive from it.
1.2DLMay 6, 2015
Mining Scientific Papers for Bibliometrics: a (very) Brief Survey of Methods and ToolsIana Atanassova, Marc Bertin, Philipp Mayr
The Open Access movement in scientific publishing and search engines like Google Scholar have made scientific articles more broadly accessible. During the last decade, the availability of scientific papers in full text has become more and more widespread thanks to the growing number of publications on online platforms such as ArXiv and CiteSeer. The efforts to provide articles in machine-readable formats and the rise of Open Access publishing have resulted in a number of standardized formats for scientific papers (such as NLM-JATS, TEI, DocBook). Our aim is to stimulate research at the intersection of Bibliometrics and Computational Linguistics in order to study the ways Bibliometrics can benefit from large-scale text analytics and sense mining of scientific papers, thus exploring the interdisciplinarity of Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing.
1.2DLMar 3, 2015
Assessing a human mediated current awareness serviceZeljko Carevic, Thomas Krichel, Philipp Mayr
In this paper, we present an approach for analyzing the behavior of editors in the large current awareness service "NEP: New Economics Papers". We processed data from more than 38,000 issues derived from 90 different NEP reports over the past ten years. The aim of our analysis was to gain an inside to the editor behaviour when creating an issue and to look for factors that influence the success of a report. In our study we looked at the following features: average editing time, the average number of papers in an issue and the editor effort measured on presorted issues as relative search length (RSL). We found an average issue size of 12.4 documents per issue. The average editing time is rather low with 14.5 minute. We get to the point that the success of a report is mainly driven by its topic and the number of subscribers, as well as proactive action by the editor to promote the report in her community.
3.2IRFeb 6, 2015
Editorial for the Proceedings of the Workshop Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR2014) at Digital Libraries 2014Peter Mutschke, Philipp Mayr, Andrea Scharnhorst
Knowledge maps are promising tools for visualizing the structure of large-scale information spaces, but still far away from being applicable for searching. The first international workshop on "Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR)", held as part of the International Conference on Digital Libraries 2014 in London, aimed at bringing together experts in Information Retrieval (IR) and knowledge mapping in order to discuss the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes.
3.2IRJan 12, 2015
Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval: 2nd International BIR WorkshopPhilipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Andrea Scharnhorst et al.
This workshop brings together experts of communities which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics / scientometrics / informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on the other. Our motivation as organizers of the workshop started from the observation that main discourses in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides. Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. On the other side, more and more information professionals, working in libraries and archives are confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. This way knowledge exchange becomes more urgent. The first workshop set the research agenda, by introducing in each other methods, reporting about current research problems and brainstorming about common interests. This follow-up workshop continues the overall communication, but also puts one problem into the focus. In particular, we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley or ResearchGate. This second BIR workshop continues to raise awareness of the missing link between Information Retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics and contributes to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the scholarly search engine interface.
17.4IRNov 6, 2014
Scientometrics and Information Retrieval - weak-links revitalizedPhilipp Mayr, Andrea Scharnhorst
This special issue brings together eight papers from experts of communities which often have been perceived as different once: bibliometrics, scientometrics and informetrics on the one side and information retrieval on the other. The idea of this special issue started at the workshop "Combining Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval" held at the 14th International Conference of Scientometrics and Informetrics, Vienna, July 14-19, 2013. Our motivation as guest editors started from the observation that main discourses in both fields are different, that communities are only partly overlapping and from the belief that a knowledge transfer would be profitable for both sides.
3.3IRAug 21, 2014
Is Evaluating Visual Search Interfaces in Digital Libraries Still an Issue?Wilko van Hoek, Philipp Mayr
Although various visual interfaces for digital libraries have been developed in prototypical systems, very few of these visual approaches have been integrated into today's digital libraries. In this position paper we argue that this is most likely due to the fact that the evaluation results of most visual systems lack comparability. There is no fix standard on how to evaluate visual interactive user interfaces. Therefore it is not possible to identify which approach is more suitable for a certain context. We feel that the comparability of evaluation results could be improved by building a common evaluation setup consisting of a reference system, based on a standardized corpus with fixed tasks and a panel for possible participants.
2.3DLAug 19, 2014
Are topic-specific search term, journal name and author name recommendations relevant for researchers?Philipp Mayr
In this paper we describe a case study where researchers in the social sciences (n=19) assess topical relevance for controlled search terms, journal names and author names which have been compiled automatically by bibliometric-enhanced information retrieval (IR) services. We call these bibliometric-enhanced IR services Search Term Recommender (STR), Journal Name Recommender (JNR) and Author Name Recommender (ANR) in this paper. The researchers in our study (practitioners, PhD students and postdocs) were asked to assess the top n pre-processed recommendations from each recommender for specific research topics which have been named by them in an interview before the experiment. Our results show clearly that the presented search term, journal name and author name recommendations are highly relevant to the researchers' topic and can easily be integrated for search in Digital Libraries. The average precision for top ranked recommendations is 0.75 for author names, 0.74 for search terms and 0.73 for journal names. The relevance distribution differs largely across topics and researcher types. Practitioners seem to favor author name recommendations while postdocs have rated author name recommendations the lowest. In the experiment the small postdoc group (n=3) favor journal name recommendations.
1.2DLJul 27, 2014
Recommender Systems using Pennant Diagrams in Digital LibrariesZeljko Carevic, Philipp Mayr
In digital libraries recommendations can be valuable for researchers, e.g. recommending related literature to a given context. Typically, in a scientific context the simple presentation of related content is not sufficient. Often the users demand a more detailed view on the connection of a document and its specific recommendations. The aim of pennants introduced by Howard White (2007) is to provide the user with a graph showing the relatedness / distance between a given document and related documents. Co-citation but also co-occurrence analysis are established methods for finding related documents to a seed. A seed could be for instance an author, a keyword, or a publication. In this paper we introduce a recommender system in the digital library sowiport using pennant diagrams which can be created from co-citation and/or co-occurrence analysis. The presentation at the NKOS workshop will present demos of pennants in sowiport and will elaborate on practical questions in visualizing pennants and evaluating the utility of pennants for search.
7.9IRJul 6, 2014
Establishing an Online Access Panel for Interactive Information Retrieval ResearchDagmar Kern, Peter Mutschke, Philipp Mayr
We propose an online access panel to support the evaluation process of Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) systems - called IIRpanel. By maintaining an online access panel with users of IIR systems we assume that the recurring effort to recruit participants for web-based as well as for lab studies can be minimized. We target on using the online access panel not only for our own development processes but to open it for other interested researchers in the field of IIR. In this paper we present the concept of IIRpanel as well as first implementation details.
9.6IRJul 6, 2014
A Framework for Specific Term Recommendation SystemsThomas Lüke, Philipp Schaer, Philipp Mayr
In this paper we present the IRSA framework that enables the automatic creation of search term suggestion or recommendation systems (TS). Such TS are used to operationalize interactive query expansion and help users in refining their information need in the query formulation phase. Our recent research has shown TS to be more effective when specific to a certain domain. The presented technical framework allows owners of Digital Libraries to create their own specific TS constructed via OAI-harvested metadata with very little effort.
3.3IRMay 30, 2014
Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR)Peter Mutschke, Andrea Scharnhorst, Christophe Guéret et al.
Information systems usually show as a particular point of failure the vagueness between user search terms and the knowledge orders of the information space in question. Some kind of guided searching therefore becomes more and more important in order to precisely discover information without knowing the right search terms. Knowledge maps of digital library collections are promising navigation tools through knowledge spaces but still far away from being applicable for searching digital libraries. However, there is no continuous knowledge exchange between the "map makers" on the one hand and the Information Retrieval (IR) specialists on the other hand. Thus, there is also a lack of models that properly combine insights of the two strands. The proposed workshop aims at bringing together these two communities: experts in IR reflecting on visual enhanced search interfaces and experts in knowledge mapping reflecting on visualizations of the content of a collection that might also present a context for a search term in a visual manner. The intention of the workshop is to raise awareness of the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes and to create a common ground for experiments aiming at the incorporation of knowledge maps into IR models at the level of the user interface.
5.8IRApr 28, 2014
Editorial for the Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval Workshop at ECIR 2014Philipp Mayr, Philipp Schaer, Andrea Scharnhorst et al.
This first "Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval" (BIR 2014) workshop aims to engage with the IR community about possible links to bibliometrics and scholarly communication. Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. In this workshop we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship, such as Bradfordizing or network analysis of co-authorship network, can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain collections. This workshop aims to raise awareness of the missing link between information retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics / scientometrics and to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the digital library interface. Our interests include information retrieval, information seeking, science modelling, network analysis, and digital libraries. The goal is to apply insights from bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics to concrete practical problems of information retrieval and browsing.
1.2DLMar 31, 2014
Identifying User Behavior in domain-specific RepositoriesWilko van Hoek, Wei Shen, Philipp Mayr
This paper presents an analysis of the user behavior of two different domain-specific repositories. The web analytic tool etracker was used to gain a first overall insight into the user behavior of these repositories. Moreover, we extended our work to describe an apache web log analysis approach which focuses on the identification of the user behavior. Therefore the user traffic within our systems is visualized using chord diagrams. We could find that recommendations are used frequently and users do rarely combine searching with faceting or filtering.
9.8IROct 30, 2013
Bibliometric-enhanced Information RetrievalPhilipp Mayr, Andrea Scharnhorst, Birger Larsen et al.
Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. In this workshop we will explore how statistical modelling of scholarship, such as Bradfordizing or network analysis of coauthorship network, can improve retrieval services for specific communities, as well as for large, cross-domain collections. This workshop aims to raise awareness of the missing link between information retrieval (IR) and bibliometrics/scientometrics and to create a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the digital library interface.
2.3DLOct 14, 2013
Pennants for DescriptorsHoward D. White, Philipp Mayr
We present a new technique (called pennants) for displaying the descriptors related to a descriptor across literatures, rather in a thesaurus. It has definite implications for online searching and browsing. Pennants, named for the flag they resemble, are a form of algorithmic prediction. Their cognitive base is in relevance theory (RT) from linguistic pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson 1995).
3.3IRMay 2, 2013
Relevance distributions across Bradford Zones: Can Bradfordizing improve search?Philipp Mayr
The purpose of this paper is to describe the evaluation of the effectiveness of the bibliometric technique Bradfordizing in an information retrieval (IR) scenario. Bradfordizing is used to re-rank topical document sets from conventional abstracting & indexing (A&I) databases into core and more peripheral document zones. Bradfordized lists of journal articles and monographs will be tested in a controlled scenario consisting of different A&I databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science, 164 standardized IR topics and intellectual assessments of the listed documents. Does Bradfordizing improve the ratio of relevant documents in the first third (core) compared to the second and last third (zone 2 and zone 3, respectively)? The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if documents in the core are compared with documents in the succeeding zones. After Bradfordizing of document pools, the core has a significant better average precision than zone 2, zone 3 and baseline. This paper should be seen as an argument in favour of alternative non-textual (bibliometric) re-ranking methods which can be simply applied in text-based retrieval systems and in particular in A&I databases.
4.3DLApr 15, 2013
Assessing Visualization Techniques for the Search Process in Digital LibrariesWilko van Hoek, Philipp Mayr
In this paper we present an overview of several visualization techniques to support the search process in Digital Libraries (DLs). The search process typically can be separated into three major phases: query formulation and refinement, browsing through result lists and viewing and interacting with documents and their properties. We discuss a selection of popular visualization techniques that have been developed for the different phases to support the user during the search process. Along prototypes based on the different techniques we show how the approaches have been implemented. Although various visualizations have been developed in prototypical systems very few of these approaches have been adapted into today's DLs. We conclude that this is most likely due to the fact that most systems are not evaluated intensely in real-life scenarios with real information seekers and that results of the interesting visualization techniques are often not comparable. We can say that many of the assessed systems did not properly address the information need of cur-rent users.
3.2HCSep 11, 2012
Visualizations in Exploratory Search: A User Study with Stock Market InformationDaniel Hienert, Philipp Mayr
In this paper we present an approach that integrates interactive visualizations in the exploratory search process. In this model visualizations can act as hubs where large amounts of information are made accessible in easy user interfaces. Through interaction techniques this information can be combined with related information on the World Wide Web. We applied the new search concept to the domain of stock market information and conducted a user study. Participants could use this interface without instructions, could complete complex tasks like identifying related information items, link heterogeneous information types and use different interaction techniques to access related information more easily. In this way, users could quickly acquire knowledge in an unfamiliar domain.
5.9IRJun 11, 2012
Extending Term Suggestion with Author NamesPhilipp Schaer, Philipp Mayr, Thomas Lüke
Term suggestion or recommendation modules can help users to formulate their queries by mapping their personal vocabularies onto the specialized vocabulary of a digital library. While we examined actual user queries of the social sciences digital library Sowiport we could see that nearly one third of the users were explicitly looking for author names rather than terms. Common term recommenders neglect this fact. By picking up the idea of polyrepresentation we could show that in a standardized IR evaluation setting we can significantly increase the retrieval performances by adding topical-related author names to the query. This positive effect only appears when the query is additionally expanded with thesaurus terms. By just adding the author names to a query we often observe a query drift which results in worse results.
1.2DLJan 12, 2012
Integrating Interactive Visualizations in the Search Process of Digital Libraries and IR SystemsDaniel Hienert, Frank Sawitzki, Philipp Schaer et al.
Interactive visualizations for exploring and retrieval have not yet become an integral part of digital libraries and information retrieval systems. We have integrated a set of interactive graphics in a real world social science digital library. These visualizations support the exploration of search queries, results and authors, can filter search results, show trends in the database and can support the creation of new search queries. The use of weighted brushing supports the identification of related metadata for search facets. We discuss some use cases of the combination of IR systems and interactive graphics. In a user study we verify that users can gain insights from statistical graphics intuitively and can adopt interaction techniques.