ParsRec: A Novel Meta-Learning Approach to Recommending Bibliographic Reference Parsers
This work addresses the challenge of improving metadata extraction accuracy for researchers and librarians by providing a more effective tool for parsing bibliographic references, though it is incremental as it builds on existing parsers with a meta-learning approach.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent performance in bibliographic reference parsers by proposing ParsRec, a meta-learning recommender system that selects the best parser for each reference string or metadata type, achieving a 2.6% increase in F1 score and significant reductions in false positive and negative rates compared to the best single parser.
Bibliographic reference parsers extract machine-readable metadata such as author names, title, journal, and year from bibliographic reference strings. To extract the metadata, the parsers apply heuristics or machine learning. However, no reference parser, and no algorithm, consistently gives the best results in every scenario. For instance, one tool may be best in extracting titles in ACM citation style, but only third best when APA is used. Another tool may be best in extracting English author names, while another one is best for noisy data (i.e. inconsistent citation styles). In this paper, which is an extended version of our recent RecSys poster, we address the problem of reference parsing from a recommender-systems and meta-learning perspective. We propose ParsRec, a meta-learning based recommender-system that recommends the potentially most effective parser for a given reference string. ParsRec recommends one out of 10 open-source parsers: Anystyle-Parser, Biblio, CERMINE, Citation, Citation-Parser, GROBID, ParsCit, PDFSSA4MET, Reference Tagger, and Science Parse. We evaluate ParsRec on 105k references from chemistry. We propose two approaches to meta-learning recommendations. The first approach learns the best parser for an entire reference string. The second approach learns the best parser for each metadata type in a reference string. The second approach achieved a 2.6% increase in F1 (0.909 vs. 0.886) over the best single parser (GROBID), reducing the false positive rate by 20.2% (0.075 vs. 0.094), and the false negative rate by 18.9% (0.107 vs. 0.132).