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The integration of learning analytics and artificial intelligence methods into education is part of the latest developments and significantly affects chemistry education (research): researchers might face the challenge of collecting and analyzing content-rich data sets involving interdisciplinary approaches from computer science, chemistry, and chemistry education. Developing a learning platform offers a higher degree of freedom compared to using existing Learning Management Systems. This paper presents a step-by-step overview of how we designed and created the web-based learning platform “I3Learn”. This concrete example showcases how the content management system WordPress can be utilized to develop an online learning infrastructure that enables the application of learning analytics methods. Our approach allows collection of time-accurate log files concerning individual usage behaviors without programming skills. The step-by-step overview enables chemistry education researchers to set up a customized web-based learning platform and lay the data foundation for learning analytics. The value of the I3Learn platform is shown through a compelling use-case scenario involving 580 9th- and 10th-grade learners in German chemistry classrooms. In this scenario, we collected and analyzed half a million log files, and we report exemplary results and insights from the data.

In the context of inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework used worldwide to create learning opportunities accessible to all learners. While much research focused on the design and students' perceptions of UDL-based learning settings, studies on students’ usage patterns in UDL-guided elements, particularly in digital environments, are still scarce. Therefore, we analyze and cluster the usage patterns of 9th and 10th graders in a web-based learning platform called I3Learn. The platform focuses on chemistry learning, and UDL principles guide its design. We collected the temporal usage patterns of UDL-guided elements of 384 learners in detailed log files. The collected data includes the time spent using video and/or text as a source of information, working on learning tasks with or without help and working on self-assessments. We used Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify relevant factors in the observed usage behaviors. Based on the factor loadings, we extracted features for k-means clustering and named the resulting groups based on their usage patterns and learner characteristics. The EFA revealed four factors suggesting that learners remain consistent in selecting UDL-guided elements that require a decision (video or text, tasks with or without help). Based on these four factors, the cluster analysis identifies six different groups. We discuss these results as a starting point to provide individualized learning support through further artificial intelligence applications and inform educators about learner activity through a dashboard.

The automatic semantic structuring of scientific text allows for more efficient reading of research articles and is an important indexing step for academic search engines. Sequential sentence classification is an essential structuring task and targets the categorisation of sentences based on their content and context. However, the potential of transfer learning for sentence classification across different scientific domains and text types, such as full papers and abstracts, has not yet been explored in prior work. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of transfer learning for scientific sequential sentence classification. For this purpose, we derive seven research questions and present several contributions to address them: (1) We suggest a novel uniform deep learning architecture and multi-task learning for cross-domain sequential sentence classification in scientific text. (2) We tailor two transfer learning methods to deal with the given task, namely sequential transfer learning and multi-task learning. (3) We compare the results of the two best models using qualitative examples in a case study. (4) We provide an approach for the semi-automatic identification of semantically related classes across annotation schemes and analyse the results for four annotation schemes. The clusters and underlying semantic vectors are validated using k-means clustering. (5) Our comprehensive experimental results indicate that when using the proposed multi-task learning architecture, models trained on datasets from different scientific domains benefit from one another. Our approach significantly outperforms state of the art on full paper datasets while being on par for datasets consisting of abstracts.

Nowadays, learning increasingly involves the usage of search engines and web resources. The related interdisciplinary research field search as learning aims to understand how people learn on the web. Previous work has investigated several feature classes to predict, for instance, the expected knowledge gain during web search. Therein, eye-tracking features have not been extensively studied so far. In this paper, we extend a previously used reading model from a line-based one to one that can detect reading sequences across multiple lines. We use publicly available study data from a web-based learning task to examine the relationship between our feature set and the participants' test scores. Our findings demonstrate that learners with higher knowledge gain spent significantly more time reading, and processing more words in total. We also find evidence that faster reading at the expense of more backward regressions may be an indicator of better web-based learning. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/TIBHannover/reading_web_search., Comment: This preprint has not undergone peer review (when applicable) or any post-submission improvements or corrections. Accepted at ECIR 2024

Today's search engines allow users to discover relevant information in different types of modalities or media, e.g., web pages, text documents, images, or videos. It is, however, a challenging task to present mixed-modality result lists in an effective and easy-to-skim form. The two most commonly used approaches are to present the modalities side-by-side, each in a separate column of the result page; or to separate the modalities into multiple tabs. However, the field lacks a structured investigation on how the column or tab layout influence the users' perception and usage of multimodal resources in an academic search task. In this paper, we present a user study (N=50) where the participants were asked to accomplish a search task for a fictive computer science seminar at the university. We evaluate the influence of the different layouts on (1) user search behavior (e.g., time until first resource is saved) and (2) the relevance of the selected resources for the task at hand. Finally, we discuss the results and possible implications for the design of multimodal search result presentation.

More and more Learning Objects like lessons, exercises, worksheets and lesson plans are available online. Finding them, however, is a challenge as they often lack metadata concerning format, content and, in the K-12 context: grade-levels or age ranges for which they are appropriate. This work studies the automatic content-based assignment of this last aspect of Learning Object metadata. For this purpose, we (a) collected a dataset of physics lessons, (b) explored a set of text-based features for their automatic analysis (derived from both dense vector representations and entity linking methods) and (c) trained a machine learning model with different subsets of these features to predict a resource’s target grade level. We compare and discuss the results.

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish academic work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of predatory publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. A systematic requirements analysis was conducted in the form of a survey. The developed tool suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendations are built on open data, publisher-independent and work across domains and languages. Transparency is provided by its open source nature, an open application programming interface (API) and by specifying which matches the shown recommendations are based on. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using two different evaluation techniques, including several new recommendation methods. We were able to improve the results from our previous paper with a pre-trained transformer model. The beta version of the tool received positive feedback from the community and in several test sessions. We developed a recommendation system for open access journals to help researchers find a suitable journal. The open tool has been extensively tested, and we found possible improvements for our current recommendation technique. Development by two German academic libraries ensures the longevity and sustainability of the system.

People increasingly use videos on the Web as a source for learning. To support this way of learning, researchers and developers are continuously developing tools, proposing guidelines, analyzing data, and conducting experiments. However, it is still not clear what characteristics a video should have to be an effective learning medium. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of 257 articles on video-based learning for the period from 2016 to 2021. One of the aims of the review is to identify the video characteristics that have been explored by previous work. Based on our analysis, we suggest a taxonomy which organizes the video characteristics and contextual aspects into eight categories: (1) audio features, (2) visual features, (3) textual features, (4) instructor behavior, (5) learners activities, (6) interactive features (quizzes, etc.), (7) production style, and (8) instructional design. Also, we identify four representative research directions: (1) proposals of tools to support video-based learning, (2) studies with controlled experiments, (3) data analysis studies, and (4) proposals of design guidelines for learning videos. We find that the most explored characteristics are textual features followed by visual features, learner activities, and interactive features. Text of transcripts, video frames, and images (figures and illustrations) are most frequently used by tools that support learning through videos. The learner activity is heavily explored through log files in data analysis studies, and interactive features have been frequently scrutinized in controlled experiments. We complement our review by contrasting research findings that investigate the impact of video characteristics on the learning effectiveness, report on tasks and technologies used to develop tools that support learning, and summarize trends of design guidelines to produce learning videos

Sequential sentence classification deals with the categorisation of sentences based on their content and context. Applied to scientific texts, it enables the automatic structuring of research papers and the improvement of academic search engines. However, previous work has not investigated the potential of transfer learning for sentence classification across different scientific domains and the issue of different text structure of full papers and abstracts. In this paper, we derive seven related research questions and present several contributions to address them: First, we suggest a novel uniform deep learning architecture and multi-Task learning for cross-domain sequential sentence classification in scientific texts. Second, we tailor two common transfer learning methods, sequential transfer learning and multi-Task learning, to deal with the challenges of the given task. Semantic relatedness of tasks is a prerequisite for successful transfer learning of neural models. Consequently, our third contribution is an approach to semi-Automatically identify semantically related classes from different annotation schemes and we present an analysis of four annotation schemes. Comprehensive experimental results indicate that models, which are trained on datasets from different scientific domains, benefit from one another when using the proposed multi-Task learning architecture. We also report comparisons with several state-of-The-Art approaches. Our approach outperforms the state of the art on full paper datasets significantly while being on par for datasets consisting of abstracts.

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project.

Formative assessment is considered to be helpful in students' learning support and teaching design. Following Aufschnaiter's and Alonzo's framework, formative assessment practices of teachers can be subdivided into three practices: eliciting evidence, interpreting evidence and responding. Since students' conceptions are judged to be important for meaningful learning across disciplines, teachers are required to assess their students' conceptions. The focus of this article lies on the discussion of learning analytics for supporting the assessment of students' conceptions in class. The existing and potential contributions of learning analytics are discussed related to the named formative assessment framework in order to enhance the teachers' options to consider individual students' conceptions. We refer to findings from biology and computer science education on existing assessment tools and identify limitations and potentials with respect to the assessment of students' conceptions. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Students' conceptions are considered to be important for learning processes, but interpreting evidence for learning with respect to students' conceptions is challenging for teachers. Assessment tools have been developed in different educational domains for teaching practice. Techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning have been applied for automated assessment of specific aspects of learning. What does the paper add Findings on existing assessment tools from two educational domains are summarised and limitations with respect to assessment of students' conceptions are identified. Relevent data that needs to be analysed for insights into students' conceptions is identified from an educational perspective. Potential contributions of learning analytics to support the challenging task to elicit students' conceptions are discussed. Implications for practice and/or policy Learning analytics can enhance the eliciting of stude

Using a Web search engine is one of today’s most frequent activities. Exploratory search activities which are carried out in order to gain knowledge are conceptualized and denoted as Search as Learning (SAL). In this paper, we introduce a novel framework model which incorporates the perspective of both psychology and computer science to describe the search as learning process by reviewing recent literature. The main entities of the model are the learner who is surrounded by a specific learning context, the interface that mediates between the learner and the information environment, the information retrieval (IR) backend which manages the processes between the interface and the set of Web resources, that is, the collective Web knowledge represented in resources of different modalities. At first, we provide an overview of the current state of the art with regard to the five main entities of our model, before we outline areas of future research to improve our understanding of search as learning processes. Copyright © 2022 von Hoyer, Hoppe, Kammerer, Otto, Pardi, Rokicki, Yu, Dietze, Ewerth and Holtz.

With the recent surge in digitalization across all levels of education, online video platforms gained educational relevance. Therefore, optimizing such platforms in line with learners’ actual needs should be considered a priority for scientists and educators alike. In this project, we triangulate logfiles of a large German online video platform for educational videos with behavioral data from a laboratory study and the objective characteristics of the selected videos. We aim to understand the potential motives for why participants pause educational videos while watching such videos online. Our analyses revealed that perceived difficulties in comprehension and meaningful structural breakpoints in the videos were associated with increased pausing behavior. In contrast, pausing behavior was not associated with the videos’ formal structural features highlighted in the video platform. Implications of these findings and the potentials of our methodological approach for theory and practice are discussed. © 2021 The Authors

Informal learning on the Web using search engines as well as more structured learning on MOOC platforms have become very popular in recent years. As a result of the vast amount of available learning resources, intelligent retrieval and recommendation methods are indispensable -- this is true also for MOOC videos. However, the automatic assessment of this content with regard to predicting (potential) knowledge gain has not been addressed by previous work yet. In this paper, we investigate whether we can predict learning success after MOOC video consumption using 1) multimodal features covering slide and speech content, and 2) a wide range of text-based features describing the content of the video. In a comprehensive experimental setting, we test four different classifiers and various feature subset combinations. We conduct a detailed feature importance analysis to gain insights in which modality benefits knowledge gain prediction the most., Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables

The emerging research field Search as Learning investigates how the Web facilitates learning through modern information retrieval systems. SAL research requires significant amounts of data that capture both search behavior of users and their acquired knowledge in order to obtain conclusive insights or train supervised machine learning models. However, the creation of such datasets is costly and requires interdisciplinary efforts in order to design studies and capture a wide range of features. In this paper, we address this issue and introduce an extensive dataset based on a user study, in which $114$ participants were asked to learn about the formation of lightning and thunder. Participants' knowledge states were measured before and after Web search through multiple-choice questionnaires and essay-based free recall tasks. To enable future research in SAL-related tasks we recorded a plethora of features and person-related attributes. Besides the screen recordings, visited Web pages, and detailed browsing histories, a large number of behavioral features and resource features were monitored. We underline the usefulness of the dataset by describing three, already published, use cases., Comment: To be published at the 2022 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '22)

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project.

Search engines are normally not designed to support human learning intents and processes. The field of Search as Learning (SAL) aims to investigate the characteristics of a successful Web search with a learning purpose. In this paper, we analyze the impact of text complexity of Web pages on predicting knowledge gain during a search session. For this purpose, we conduct an experimental case study and investigate the influence of several text-based features and classifiers on the prediction task. We build upon data from a study of related work, where 104 participants were given the task to learn about the formation of lightning and thunder through Web search. We perform an extensive evaluation based on a state-of-the-art approach and extend it with additional features related to textual complexity of Web pages. In contrast to prior work, we perform a systematic search for optimal hyperparameters and show the possible influence of feature selection strategies on the knowledge gain prediction. When using the new set of features, state-of-the-art results are noticeably improved. The results indicate that text complexity of Web pages could be an important feature resource for knowledge gain prediction.

Human learning shifts stronger than ever towards online settings, and especially towards video platforms. There is an abundance of tutorials and lectures covering diverse topics, from fixing a bike to particle physics. While it is advantageous that learning resources are freely available on the Web, the quality of the resources varies a lot. Given the number of available videos, users need algorithmic support in finding helpful and entertaining learning resources. In this paper, we present a review of the recent research literature (2020-2021) on video-based learning. We focus on publications that examine the characteristics of video content, analyze frequently used features and technologies, and, finally, derive conclusions on trends and possible future research directions

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions.

Illustrations are widely used in education, and sometimes, alternatives are not available for visually impaired students. Therefore, those students would benefit greatly from an automatic illustration description system, but only if those descriptions were complete, correct, and easily understandable using a screenreader. In this paper, we report on a study for the assessment of automated image descriptions. We interviewed experts to establish evaluation criteria, which we then used to create an evaluation questionnaire for sighted non-expert raters, and description templates. We used this questionnaire to evaluate the quality of descriptions which could be generated with a template-based automatic image describer. We present evidence that these templates have the potential to generate useful descriptions, and that the questionnaire identifies problems with description templates., Comment: 6 pages, 12 references. Accepted for publication at the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2021), June 14-16 2021, Utrecht, The Netherlands

In informal learning scenarios the popularity of multimedia content, such as video tutorials or lectures, has significantly increased. Yet, the users' interactions, navigation behavior, and consequently learning outcome, have not been researched extensively. Related work in this field, also called search as learning, has focused on behavioral or text resource features to predict learning outcome and knowledge gain. In this paper, we investigate whether we can exploit features representing multimedia resource consumption to predict of knowledge gain (KG) during Web search from in-session data, that is without prior knowledge about the learner. For this purpose, we suggest a set of multimedia features related to image and video consumption. Our feature extraction is evaluated in a lab study with 113 participants where we collected data for a given search as learning task on the formation of thunderstorms and lightning. We automatically analyze the monitored log data and utilize state-of-the-art computer vision methods to extract features about the seen multimedia resources. Experimental results demonstrate that multimedia features can improve KG prediction. Finally, we provide an analysis on feature importance (text and multimedia) for KG prediction., Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

Citation recommendation for research papers is a valuable task that can help researchers improve the quality of their work by suggesting relevant related work. Current approaches for this task rely primarily on the text of the papers and the citation network. In this paper, we propose to exploit an additional source of information, namely research knowledge graphs (KG) that interlink research papers based on mentioned scientific concepts. Our experimental results demonstrate that the combination of information from research KGs with existing state-of-the-art approaches is beneficial. Experimental results are presented for the STM-KG (STM: Science, Technology, Medicine), which is an automatically populated knowledge graph based on the scientific concepts extracted from papers of ten domains. The proposed approach outperforms the state of the art with a mean average precision of 20.6% (+0.8) for the top-50 retrieved results., Comment: Accepted for publication in 25th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL), 2021

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2005.10334

Sequential sentence classification deals with the categorisation of sentences based on their content and context. Applied to scientific texts, it enables the automatic structuring of research papers and the improvement of academic search engines. However, previous work has not investigated the potential of transfer learning for sentence classification across different scientific domains and the issue of different text structure of full papers and abstracts. In this paper, we derive seven related research questions and present several contributions to address them: First, we suggest a novel uniform deep learning architecture and multi-task learning for cross-domain sequential sentence classification in scientific texts. Second, we tailor two common transfer learning methods, sequential transfer learning and multi-task learning, to deal with the challenges of the given task. Semantic relatedness of tasks is a prerequisite for successful transfer learning of neural models. Consequently, our third contribution is an approach to semi-automatically identify semantically related classes from different annotation schemes and we present an analysis of four annotation schemes. Comprehensive experimental results indicate that models, which are trained on datasets from different scientific domains, benefit from one another when using the proposed multi-task learning architecture. We also report comparisons with several state-of-the-art approaches. Our approach outperforms the state of the art on full paper datasets significantly while being on par for datasets consisting of abstracts., Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), 2022

Coreference resolution is essential for automatic text understanding to facilitate high-level information retrieval tasks such as text summarisation or question answering. Previous work indicates that the performance of state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. based on BERT) noticeably declines when applied to scientific papers. In this paper, we investigate the task of coreference resolution in research papers and subsequent knowledge graph population. We present the following contributions: (1) We annotate a corpus for coreference resolution that comprises 10 different scientific disciplines from Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM); (2) We propose transfer learning for automatic coreference resolution in research papers; (3) We analyse the impact of coreference resolution on knowledge graph (KG) population; (4) We release a research KG that is automatically populated from 55,485 papers in 10 STM domains. Comprehensive experiments show the usefulness of the proposed approach. Our transfer learning approach considerably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on our corpus with an F1 score of 61.4 (+11.0), while the evaluation against a gold standard KG shows that coreference resolution improves the quality of the populated KG significantly with an F1 score of 63.5 (+21.8)., Comment: Accepted for publication in 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2021

We introduce the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) Dataset for Scientific Entity Extraction, Classification, and Resolution, version 1.0 (STEM-ECR v1.0). The STEM-ECR v1.0 dataset has been developed to provide a benchmark for the evaluation of scientific entity extraction, classification, and resolution tasks in a domain-independent fashion. It comprises abstracts in 10 STEM disciplines that were found to be the most prolific ones on a major publishing platform. We describe the creation of such a multidisciplinary corpus and highlight the obtained findings in terms of the following features: 1) a generic conceptual formalism for scientific entities in a multidisciplinary scientific context; 2) the feasibility of the domain-independent human annotation of scientific entities under such a generic formalism; 3) a performance benchmark obtainable for automatic extraction of multidisciplinary scientific entities using BERT-based neural models; 4) a delineated 3-step entity resolution procedure for human annotation of the scientific entities via encyclopedic entity linking and lexicographic word sense disambiguation; and 5) human evaluations of Babelfy returned encyclopedic links and lexicographic senses for our entities. Our findings cumulatively indicate that human annotation and automatic learning of multidisciplinary scientific concepts as well as their semantic disambiguation in a wide-ranging setting as STEM is reasonable.

Ranking and recommendation of multimedia content such as videos is usually realized with respect to the relevance to a user query. However, for lecture videos and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) it is not only required to retrieve relevant videos, but particularly to find lecture videos of high quality that facilitate learning, for instance, independent of the video's or speaker's popularity. Thus, metadata about a lecture video's quality are crucial features for learning contexts, e.g., lecture video recommendation in search as learning scenarios. In this paper, we investigate whether automatically extracted features are correlated to quality aspects of a video. A set of scholarly videos from a Mass Open Online Course (MOOC) is analyzed regarding audio, linguistic, and visual features. Furthermore, a set of cross-modal features is proposed which are derived by combining transcripts, audio, video, and slide content. A user study is conducted to investigate the correlations between the automatically collected features and human ratings of quality aspects of a lecture video. Finally, the impact of our features on the knowledge gain of the participants is discussed.

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get an overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KGs) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective by presenting a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications and outline possible solutions., Comment: Accepted for publishing in 24th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2020

We introduce the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) Dataset for Scientific Entity Extraction, Classification, and Resolution, version 1.0 (STEM-ECR v1.0). The STEM-ECR v1.0 dataset has been developed to provide a benchmark for the evaluation of scientific entity extraction, classification, and resolution tasks in a domain-independent fashion. It comprises abstracts in 10 STEM disciplines that were found to be the most prolific ones on a major publishing platform. We describe the creation of such a multidisciplinary corpus and highlight the obtained findings in terms of the following features: 1) a generic conceptual formalism for scientific entities in a multidisciplinary scientific context; 2) the feasibility of the domain-independent human annotation of scientific entities under such a generic formalism; 3) a performance benchmark obtainable for automatic extraction of multidisciplinary scientific entities using BERT-based neural models; 4) a delineated 3-step entity resolution procedure for human annotation of the scientific entities via encyclopedic entity linking and lexicographic word sense disambiguation; and 5) human evaluations of Babelfy returned encyclopedic links and lexicographic senses for our entities. Our findings cumulatively indicate that human annotation and automatic learning of multidisciplinary scientific concepts as well as their semantic disambiguation in a wide-ranging setting as STEM is reasonable., Comment: Published in LREC 2020. Publication URL https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.268/; Dataset DOI https://doi.org/10.25835/0017546

We examine the novel task of domain-independent scientific concept extraction from abstracts of scholarly articles and present two contributions. First, we suggest a set of generic scientific concepts that have been identified in a systematic annotation process. This set of concepts is utilised to annotate a corpus of scientific abstracts from 10 domains of Science, Technology and Medicine at the phrasal level in a joint effort with domain experts. The resulting dataset is used in a set of benchmark experiments to (a) provide baseline performance for this task, (b) examine the transferability of concepts between domains. Second, we present two deep learning systems as baselines. In particular, we propose active learning to deal with different domains in our task. The experimental results show that (1) a substantial agreement is achievable by non-experts after consultation with domain experts, (2) the baseline system achieves a fairly high F1 score, (3) active learning enables us to nearly halve the amount of required training data., Comment: Accepted for publishing in 42nd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2020

Es ist entscheidend für Wissenschaftler in ihrem Gebiet den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zu kennen. Doch diese Aufgabe wird immer schwieriger: Einerseits werden jeden Tag mehr neue Artikel veröffentlicht; andererseits gibt es immer mehr mögliche Publikationsforen und -formen -- das Publikationssystem wird immer heterogener. . Daher müssen sich Wissenschaftler immer mehr Zeit nehmen, um die für ihre Forschung relevanten Artikel zu finden. Ein guter Indikator für diesen Trend ist der beliebte Preprint-Server arXiv. Die Anzahl der Artikel im Repository ist in den letzten 25 Jahren linear gestiegen, 2017 waren es mehr als 10.000 Artikel pro Monat. Der Fokus der arXiv-Plattform liegt auf einfachen Publishing-Diensten und daher bietet arxiv keine erweiterte Suchfunktionalität oder hilfreiche Visualisierungen. ArXiv bietet hingegen Programmierschnittstellen, die es externen Entwicklern erlauben, verschiedenste Zusatzdienste hinzuzufügen. Die meisten der existierenden Werkzeuge konzentrieren sich hierbei auf eine bestimmte Community und zeigen nur einen Bruchteil der arXiv-Daten. Andere Anwendungen bieten eine erweiterte Visualisierung, um die arXiv-Bibliothek zu erkunden.Dieser Beitrag präsentiert TIB-arXiv, ein webbasiertes Werkzeug für die Suche und Exploration von Publikationen in arXiv. Die Plattform bietet Zugang zur gesamten arXiv-Bibliothek und vereinfacht den Zugang mithilfe einer intuitiven Nutzeroberfläche. Der integrierte PDF-Reader ermöglicht es dem Nutzer, Artikel direkt auf der Webseite zu konsultieren während er den Datenbestand erkundet. Durch die Verlinkung der Publikationen mit externen Ressourcen und sozialen Medien, können dem Nutzer komplexere Retrieval- und Ranking-Methoden geboten werden. Dies ermöglicht es Wissenschaftlern, die aktuelle Entwicklung in ihrem Forschungsgebiet durch soziale und kollaborative Funktionalitäten schneller auf Aktualität und Relevanz überprüfen.

arXiv is a popular pre-print server focusing on natural science disciplines (e.g. physics, computer science, quantitative biology). As a platform with focus on easy publishing services it does not provide enhanced search functionality -- but offers programming interfaces which allow external parties to add these services. This paper presents extensions of the open source framework arXiv Sanity Preserver (SP). With respect to the original framework, it derestricts the topical focus and allows for text-based search and visualisation of all papers in arXiv. To this end, all papers are stored in a unified back-end; the extension provides enhanced search and ranking facilities and allows the exploration of arXiv papers by a novel user interface.

Scientific software is one of the key elements for reproducible research. However, classic publications and related scientific software are typically not (sufficiently) linked, and it lacks tools to jointly explore these artefacts. In this paper, we report on our work on developing an analytics tool for jointly exploring software and publications. The presented prototype, a concept for automatic code discovery, and two use cases demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the proposal. Submitted to TPDL 2018 as Demonstration Paper.