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The unknown knowns: a graph-based approach for temporal COVID-19 literature mining

Ulya Bayram (Department of Electronics Engineering, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale, Turkey)
Runia Roy (Department of Biomedical Engineering, SUNY Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA)
Aqil Assalil (Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA) (Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA)
Lamia BenHiba (Département Informatique et Aide à la Décision, Universite Mohammed V de Rabat Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Informatique et d'Analyse des Systemes, Rabat, Morocco)

Online Information Review

ISSN: 1468-4527

Article publication date: 23 March 2021

Issue publication date: 24 August 2021

281

Abstract

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a remarkable volume of research literature, and scientists are increasingly in need of intelligent tools to cut through the noise and uncover relevant research directions. As a response, the authors propose a novel framework. In this framework, the authors develop a novel weighted semantic graph model to compress the research studies efficiently. Also, the authors present two analyses on this graph to propose alternative ways to uncover additional aspects of COVID-19 research.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors construct the semantic graph using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques on COVID-19 publication texts (>100,000 texts). Next, the authors conduct an evolutionary analysis to capture the changes in COVID-19 research across time. Finally, the authors apply a link prediction study to detect novel COVID-19 research directions that are so far undiscovered.

Findings

Findings reveal the success of the semantic graph in capturing scientific knowledge and its evolution. Meanwhile, the prediction experiments provide 79% accuracy on returning intelligible links, showing the reliability of the methods for predicting novel connections that could help scientists discover potential new directions.

Originality/value

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to propose a holistic framework that includes encoding the scientific knowledge in a semantic graph, demonstrates an evolutionary examination of past and ongoing research and offers scientists with tools to generate new hypotheses and research directions through predictive modeling and deep machine learning techniques.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

In the interest of transparency, data sharing and reproducibility, the author(s) of this article have made the data underlying their research openly available. It can be accessed by following the link here: https://github.com/ubayram/COVIDGraphProject

The authors would like to thank Dakota Murray for his support and help.

Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Citation

Bayram, U., Roy, R., Assalil, A. and BenHiba, L. (2021), "The unknown knowns: a graph-based approach for temporal COVID-19 literature mining", Online Information Review, Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 687-708. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-12-2020-0562

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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