Semantic and Relational Spaces in Science of Science: Deep Learning Models for Article Vectorisation

TL;DR

This paper explores how deep learning models, specifically NLP and GNNs, can create semantic and relational vector spaces of scientific articles to facilitate large-scale literature analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of combining NLP and GNN techniques to encode semantic and social relational information in scientific publications.

Findings

NLP encodes semantic spaces of articles.

GNN captures relational and social structures.

Deep learning models reveal patterns in scientific literature.

Abstract

Over the last century, we observe a steady and exponentially growth of scientific publications globally. The overwhelming amount of available literature makes a holistic analysis of the research within a field and between fields based on manual inspection impossible. Automatic techniques to support the process of literature review are required to find the epistemic and social patterns that are embedded in scientific publications. In computer sciences, new tools have been developed to deal with large volumes of data. In particular, deep learning techniques open the possibility of automated end-to-end models to project observations to a new, low-dimensional space where the most relevant information of each observation is highlighted. Using deep learning to build new representations of scientific publications is a growing but still emerging field of research. The aim of this paper is to discuss the potential and limits of deep learning for gathering insights about scientific research articles. We focus on document-level embeddings based on the semantic and relational aspects of articles, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). We explore the different outcomes generated by those techniques. Our results show that using NLP we can encode a semantic space of articles, while with GNN we are able to build a relational space where the social practices of a research community are also encoded.