Exploring Diachronic Changes of Biomedical Knowledge using Distributed Concept Representations

Published in 18th ACL Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP 2019), 2019

Vashisth, G., Mikhailov, M., Voigt-Antons, J.-N. & Roller, R.

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In research best practices can change over time as new discoveries are made and novel methods are implemented. Scientific publications reporting about the latest facts and current state-of-the-art can be possibly outdated after some years or even proved to be false. A publication usually sheds light only on the knowledge of the period it has been published. Thus, the aspect of time can play an essential role in the reliability of the presented information. In Natural Language Processing many methods focus on information extraction from text, such as detecting entities and their relationship to each other. Those methods mostly focus on the facts presented in the text itself and not on the aspects of knowledge which changes over time. This work instead examines the evolution in biomedical knowledge over time using scientific literature in terms of diachronic change. Mainly the usage of temporal and distributional concept representations are explored and evaluated by a proof-of-concept.

Recommended citation: Vashisth, G., Mikhailov, M., Voigt-Antons, J.-N. & Roller, R. (2019, August). Exploring Diachronic Changes of Biomedical Knowledge using Distributed Concept Representations. Paper presented at the 18th ACL Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP 2019), Florence, Italy. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-5037