Automated Identification of Domain Experts at Research Institutions

Core Concepts

Developing an automated system to identify domain experts at research institutions by extracting research areas from their publications and teaching materials.

Abstract

The content discusses the challenge of finding domain experts and knowledge within larger research organizations due to the large volume of complex information. It presents an approach for an automated system to identify scholarly experts based on their publications and teaching materials.
Key highlights:

Research institutions and their output have grown significantly, but traditional manual curation of expert profiles is time-consuming and often outdated.
The proposed system ingests a list of researchers, crawls their publications, and uses a large language model to extract their research areas.
A prototype is implemented using Elasticsearch as the search engine, allowing users to search for experts by research topic and browse an overview of the institution's research areas.
Future work includes integrating additional data sources, improving the quality of the research area extraction, and exploring the use of teaching materials to further enrich the expert profiles.
The goal is to provide a scalable solution that can help stakeholders easily identify available expertise at an institution for collaboration, technology transfer, and advanced training.

Stats

Research institutions have roughly doubled in every decade, and the number of researchers has increased similarly.
Most institutions are lagging in updating publication metadata for their researchers, leading to reduced visibility and limiting the value of research institutions as hubs for innovation.
The proposed system has currently extracted 420 publications for 28 professors, with 268 papers downloaded and analyzed.

Quotes

"Research organisations and their research outputs have been growing considerably in the past decades. This large body of knowledge attracts various stakeholders, e.g., for knowledge sharing, technology transfer, or potential collaborations."
"Finding domain experts and knowledge within any larger organisation, scientific and also industrial, has thus become a serious challenge."

Key Insights Distilled From

Enhancing Research Information Systems with Identification of Domain Experts

by Gautam Kisho... at arxiv.org 04-05-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02921.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the proposed system be extended to automatically update expert profiles as researchers' areas of focus evolve over time?

To automatically update expert profiles as researchers' areas of focus evolve, the proposed system can implement a continuous monitoring mechanism. This mechanism would periodically re-crawl the researchers' publications and teaching materials to identify any shifts in their research areas. By comparing the newly extracted research areas with the existing ones in the system, it can detect changes and update the expert profiles accordingly. Additionally, implementing a notification system for researchers to review and confirm the updated profiles can ensure accuracy and relevance. Integrating machine learning algorithms to predict potential shifts in research areas based on publication trends can also aid in proactively updating expert profiles.

What are the potential privacy and ethical concerns around analyzing teaching materials to enrich expert profiles, and how can they be addressed?

Analyzing teaching materials to enrich expert profiles raises privacy concerns regarding the intellectual property rights of the educators and the confidentiality of course content. Ethical concerns include the unauthorized use of teaching materials and potential biases in the interpretation of the content. To address these concerns, explicit consent should be obtained from the educators before analyzing their teaching materials. Anonymizing the data to remove any identifying information can help protect the privacy of the educators. Implementing strict data security measures to safeguard the confidentiality of the teaching materials and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations are essential steps to address privacy and ethical concerns.

How can the research area extraction be further improved to better capture the nuances and interdisciplinary nature of modern research?

To better capture the nuances and interdisciplinary nature of modern research in research area extraction, the system can incorporate advanced natural language processing techniques. Utilizing topic modeling algorithms like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) or BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) can help identify and categorize complex research topics across multiple disciplines. Implementing entity recognition to identify key concepts, entities, and relationships within the research content can enhance the accuracy of research area extraction. Collaborating with domain experts to create custom taxonomies or ontologies that reflect the interdisciplinary nature of modern research can also improve the granularity and specificity of research area classification. Additionally, integrating feedback loops for researchers to validate and refine the extracted research areas can ensure the system captures the diverse and evolving landscape of research fields accurately.