COVID-19 Literature Topic-Based Search via Hierarchical NMF

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical NMF approach to organize COVID-19 scientific literature into a topic-based tree structure, facilitating efficient literature search and discovery for researchers.

Contribution

The study develops a novel hierarchical NMF method to categorize COVID-19 literature into a detailed topic hierarchy, enhancing literature retrieval capabilities.

Findings

Identified eight major latent topics and 52 subtopics.

Created an interactive website for literature exploration.

Organized literature into a hierarchical structure for easier search.

Abstract

A dataset of COVID-19-related scientific literature is compiled, combining the articles from several online libraries and selecting those with open access and full text available. Then, hierarchical nonnegative matrix factorization is used to organize literature related to the novel coronavirus into a tree structure that allows researchers to search for relevant literature based on detected topics. We discover eight major latent topics and 52 granular subtopics in the body of literature, related to vaccines, genetic structure and modeling of the disease and patient studies, as well as related diseases and virology. In order that our tool may help current researchers, an interactive website is created that organizes available literature using this hierarchical structure.