Multiple-path literature exploration in the context of COVID 19: LitExplorer

Background

Developing a web tool for analysis of scientific literature to gain up-to-date information related to COVID-19

• Context: COVID-19 literature published from January to the middle of May was more than 23,000 papers and doubling every 20 days.
• https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/scientists-are-drowning-covid-19-papers-can-new-tools-keep-them-afloat
• Problem: Experts across domains have an urgent need for information up-to-date and pertinent to their respective fields but they struggle to keep up with the publication volume.
• Hypothesis: Exploring literature and discovering knowledge in it can be facilitated by an environment that exposes a semantically enriched version of the literature.

Methods

• Build an environment for analysis of scientific literature related to COVID-19, which offers various modalities for aggregation of information across multiple papers.
• Our aim is to provide a web tool where COVID-19 literature is enriched by:
  – NER annotations (provided by OGER)
  – text and NER searches
  – a network of semantically connected publications (by sentence similarity)
  – extractive summarization
  – a reading strategy powered by semantic hyperlinks among sentences.