Publications

Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature

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Producing a robust and comprehensive representation of the research topics covered by a scientific publication is a crucial task that has a major impact on its retrievability and consequently on the diffusion of the relevant scientific ideas. Springer Nature, the world’s largest academic book publisher, has typically entrusted this task to the most expert editors, which had to manually analyse new books and produce a list of the most relevant topics. To support Springer Nature in this task, we developed Smart Topic Miner, an application that assists the editorial team in annotating proceedings books according to a large-scale ontology of research areas. Over the past three years, we evolved this application according to the editors’ feedback and developed a new engine, a new interface, and several other functionalities. In this demo paper, we present Smart Topic Miner 2, the most recent version of the tool, which is being regularly utilized by editors in Germany, China, Brazil, and Japan to annotate all book series covering conference proceedings in Computer Science, for a total of about 800 volumes per year.

Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Comparing the Scientific Output of Academia and Industry

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Analysing the relationship between academia and industry allows us to understand how the knowledge produced by the universities is being adopted and enriched by the industrial sector, and ultimately affects society through the release of relevant products and services. In this paper, we present a preliminary approach to assess and compare the research outputs of academia and industry. This solution integrates data from several knowledge graphs describing scientific articles (Microsoft Academics Graph), research topics (Computer Science Ontology), organizations (Global Research Identifier Database), and types of industry (DBpedia). We focus on the Semantic Web as exemplary field and report several insights regarding the different behaviours of academia and industry, and the types of industries most active in this field.

The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles

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Classifying research papers according to their research topics is an important task to improve their retrievability, assist the creation of smart analytics, and support a variety of approaches for analysing and making sense of the research environment. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a comprehensive ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science. The CSO Classifier takes as input the metadata associated with a research paper (title, abstract, keywords) and returns a selection of research concepts drawn from the ontology. The approach was evaluated on a gold standard of manually annotated articles yielding a significant improvement over alternative methods.

Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology

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The CSO Classifier is an application for automatically classifying academic papers according to the rich taxonomy of topics from CSO. The aim is to facilitate the adoption of CSO across the various communities engaged with scholarly data and to foster the development of new applications based on this knowledge base.

The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas

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Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles.

2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery

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“2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery” is a paper submitted to the RE-CODING BLACK MIRROR Workshop co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017, 21-25 October 2017, Vienna, Austria.

Authors

Andrea Mannocci, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta

Abstract

The pace of nowadays research is hectic. Datasets and papers are produced and made available on the Web at a rate so unprecedented that digesting the information conveyed by such a “data deluge” stretches far beyond human analytical capabilities. Data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics are providing researchers with new methodologies capable of coping and getting insight in an automated fashion from the overload of information conveyed. Nonetheless major advances in AI solutions for knowledge discovery risk to exacerbate some negative phenomena, which are already observable on a global scale and disrupt irremediably the way of doing science as we know it.

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Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies

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“Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies” is a research paper accepted to the Industry Track at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017 , 21-25 October 2017, Vienna, Austria.

Authors

Francesco Osborne, Angelo Salatino, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Aliaksandr Birukou and Enrico Motta

Abstract

The Open University and Springer Nature have been collaborating since 2015 in the development of an array of semantically-enhanced solutions supporting editors in i) classifying proceedings and other editorial products with respect to the relevant research areas and ii) taking informed decisions about their marketing strategy. These solutions include i) the Smart Topic API, which automatically maps keywords associated with published papers to semantically characterized topics, which are drawn from a very large and automatically-generated ontology of Computer Science topics; ii) the Smart Topic Miner, which helps editors to associate scholarly metadata to books; and iii) the Smart Book Recommender, which assists editors in deciding which editorial products should be marketed in a specific venue.

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Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products

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“Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products” is a poster paper that will be presented at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017, 21-25 October 2017, Vienna, Austria. Authors Francesco Osborne, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Angelo Salatino, Aliaksandr Birukou and Enrico Motta Abstract Academic publishers, such as Springer Nature, need to constantly make informed decisions … Read more

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

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“How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas” is a peer-reviewed paper submitted to PeerJ Computer Science. The paper has been submitted in July 2016 and accepted in May 2017. All the co-authors are thankful to the reviewers and the editor for providing insightful comments and thus improving the … Read more

Ontology Forecasting in Scientific Literature: Semantic Concepts Prediction based on Innovation-Adoption Priors

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Semantic Innovation Forecasting Model
Semantic Innovation Forecasting Model

“Ontology Forecasting in Scientific Literature: Semantic Concepts Prediction based on Innovation-Adoption Priors” is a peer-reviewed paper presented on Tuesday 22nd November 2016 at the “Entity detection, matching and evolution” session at the 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Bologna, Italy

Authors:

Amparo Elizabeth Cano-Basave, Francesco Osborne and Angelo Antonio Salatino

Abstract:

The ontology engineering research community has focused for many years on supporting the creation, development and evolution of ontologies. Ontology forecasting, which aims at predicting semantic changes in an ontology, represents instead a new challenge. In this paper, we want to give a contribution to this novel endeavour by focusing on the task of forecasting semantic concepts in the research domain. Indeed, ontologies representing scientific disciplines contain only research topics that are already popular enough to be selected by human experts or automatic algorithms. They are thus unfit to support tasks which require the ability of describing and exploring the forefront of research, such as trend detection and horizon scanning. We address this issue by introducing the Semantic Innovation Forecast (SIF) model, which predicts new concepts of an ontology at time t + 1, using only data available at time t. Our approach relies on lexical innovation and adoption information extracted from historical data. We evaluated the SIF model on a very large dataset consisting of over one million scientific papers belonging to the Computer Science domain: the outcomes show that the proposed approach offers a competitive boost in mean average precision-at-ten compared to the baselines when forecasting over 5 years.

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