Which techniques does your application use?: An information extraction framework for scientific articles

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated information extraction framework for scientific articles in computational linguistics, linking application areas with problem solving techniques and analyzing their usage over time.

Contribution

It presents a novel system combining pattern learning, language modeling, and rule-based methods to automatically categorize articles and extract application areas and techniques.

Findings

Constructed a comprehensive pool of application areas and techniques.

Achieved effective extraction using pattern learning and language modeling.

Provided temporal analysis of technique usage across application areas.

Abstract

Every field of research consists of multiple application areas with various techniques routinely used to solve problems in these wide range of application areas. With the exponential growth in research volumes, it has become difficult to keep track of the ever-growing number of application areas as well as the corresponding problem solving techniques. In this paper, we consider the computational linguistics domain and present a novel information extraction system that automatically constructs a pool of all application areas in this domain and appropriately links them with corresponding problem solving techniques. Further, we categorize individual research articles based on their application area and the techniques proposed/used in the article. k-gram based discounting method along with handwritten rules and bootstrapped pattern learning is employed to extract application areas. Subsequently, a language modeling approach is proposed to characterize each article based on its application area. Similarly, regular expressions and high-scoring noun phrases are used for the extraction of the problem solving techniques. We propose a greedy approach to characterize each article based on the techniques. Towards the end, we present a table representing the most frequent techniques adopted for a particular application area. Finally, we propose three use cases presenting an extensive temporal analysis of the usage of techniques and application areas.