Constructing an associative concept space for literature-based discovery

  • Authors:

  • C. Christiaan van der Eijk;Erik M. van Mulligen;Jan A. Kors;Barend Mons;Jan van den Berg

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC--University Medical Center Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC--University Medical Center Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC--University Medical Center Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC--University Medical Center Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Scientific literature is often fragmented, which implies that certain scientific questions can only be answered by combining information from various articles. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for finding associations between related concepts present in literature. To this end, concepts are mapped to a multidimensional space by a Hebbian type of learning algorithm using co-occurrence data as input. The resulting concept space allows exploration of the neighborhood of a concept and finding potentially novel relationships between concepts. The obtained information retrieval system is useful for finding literature supporting hypotheses and for discovering previously unknown relationships between concepts. Tests on artificial data show the potential of the proposed methodology. In addition, preliminary tests on a set of Medline abstracts yield promising results.