Making Content Discoverable is more than just a recommendation algorithm

Description

At Elsevier, a lot of effort is focussed on content discovery for users, allowing them to find the most relevant articles for their research. This, at its core, blurs the boundaries of search and recommendation as we are both pushing content to the user and allowing them to search the world’s largest catalogue of scientific research. Apart from using the content as is, we can make new content more discoverable with the help of authors at submission time, for example by getting them to write an executive summary of their paper. However, doing this at submission time means that this additional information is not available for older content. This raises the question of how we can utilise the author’s input on new content to create the same feature retrospectively to the whole Elsevier corpus. Focusing on one use case, we discuss how an extractive summarization model (which is trained on the user-submitted summaries), is used to retrospectively generate executive summaries for articles in the catalogue. Further, we show how extractive summarization is used to highlight the salient points (methods, results and finding) within research articles across the complete corpus. This helps users to identify whether an article is of particular interest for them. As a logical next step, we investigate how these extractions can be used to make the research papers more discoverable through connecting it to other papers which share similar findings, methods or conclusion. In this talk we start from the beginning, understanding what users want from summarization systems. We discuss how the proposed use cases were developed and how this ties into the discovery of new content. We then look in more technical detail at what data is available and which methods can be utilised to implement such a system. Finally, while we are working toward taking this extractive summarization system into production, we need to understand the quality of what is being produced before going live. We discuss how internal annotators were used to confirming the quality of the summaries. Though the monitoring of quality does not stop there, we continually monitor user interaction with the extractive summaries as a proxy for quality and satisfaction.

Period	Feb 3 2020
Event title	WSDM 2020
Event type	Conference
Location	Hhouston, United States, Texas