Mining Research Problems from Scientific Literature

Extracting structured information from unstructured text is a critical problem. Over the past few years, various clustering algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. In addition, various algorithms based on probabilistic topic models have been developed to find the hidden thematic structure from various corpora (i.e publications, blogs etc). Both types of algorithms have been transferred to the domain of scientific literature to extract structured information to solve problems like data exploration, expert detection etc. In order to remain domain-agnostic, these algorithms do not exploit the structure present in a scientific publication. Majority of researchers interpret a scientific publication as research conducted to report progress in solving some research problems. Following this interpretation, in this paper we present a different outlook to the same problem by modelling scientific publications around research problems. By associating a scientific publication with a research problem, exploring the scientific literature becomes more intuitive. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised framework to mine research problems from titles and abstracts of scientific literature. Our framework uses weighted frequent phrase mining to generate phrases and filters them to obtain high-quality phrases. These high-quality phrases are then used to segment the scientific publication into meaningful semantic units. After segmenting publications, we apply a number of heuristics to score the phrases and sentences to identify the research problems. In a postprocessing step we use a neighborhood based algorithm to merge different representations of the same problems. Experiments conducted on parts of DBLP dataset show promising results.