Automatic keyword assignment system for medical research articles using nearest-neighbor searches

Authors: FATİH DİLMAÇ, ADİL ALPKOÇAK

Abstract: Assigning accurate keywords to research articles is increasingly important concern. Keywords should be selected meticulously to describe the article well since keywords play an important role in matching readers with research articles in order to reach a bigger audience. So, improper selection of keywords may result in less attraction to readers which results in degradation in its audience. Hence, we designed and developed an automatic keyword assignment system (AKAS) for research articles based on k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and threshold-nearest neighbor (t-NN) accompanied with information retrieval systems (IRS), which is a corpus-based method by utilizing IRS using the Medline dataset in PubMed. First, AKAS accepts an abstract of the research article or a particular text as a query to the IRS. Next, the IRS returns a ranked list of articles to the given query. Then, we selected a set of documents from this list using two different methods, which are k-NN and t-NN representing the first k documents and documents whose similarity is greater than the threshold value of t, respectively. To evaluate our proposed system, we conducted a set of experiments on a selected subset of 458,594 PubMed articles. Then, we performed an experiment to observe the performance of AKAS results by comparing with the original keywords assigned by authors. The results we obtained showed that our system suggests keywords more than 55% match in terms of F-score. We presented both methods we used and results of experiments, in detail.

Keywords: Automatic keyword assignment, information retrieval, k-nearest neighbors,t-nearest neighbors, PubMed

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