Analyzing Scientific Publications using Domain-Specific Word Embedding and Topic Modelling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework combining domain-specific word embeddings and topic modeling to analyze scientific publications, helping to monitor research trends and identify innovations effectively.

Contribution

It proposes two novel scientific publication embeddings, PUB-G and PUB-W, that better capture semantic meanings across research fields, improving topic coherence in analysis.

Findings

PUB-G and PUB-W outperform baseline embeddings in topic coherence.

The framework effectively identifies research clusters and trends.

Experimental results demonstrate the embeddings' superiority.

Abstract

The scientific world is changing at a rapid pace, with new technology being developed and new trends being set at an increasing frequency. This paper presents a framework for conducting scientific analyses of academic publications, which is crucial to monitor research trends and identify potential innovations. This framework adopts and combines various techniques of Natural Language Processing, such as word embedding and topic modelling. Word embedding is used to capture semantic meanings of domain-specific words. We propose two novel scientific publication embedding, i.e., PUB-G and PUB-W, which are capable of learning semantic meanings of general as well as domain-specific words in various research fields. Thereafter, topic modelling is used to identify clusters of research topics within these larger research fields. We curated a publication dataset consisting of two conferences and two journals from 1995 to 2020 from two research domains. Experimental results show that our PUB-G and PUB-W embeddings are superior in comparison to other baseline embeddings by a margin of ~0.18-1.03 based on topic coherence.