Information extraction from scientific articles: a survey

Abstract

In last few decades, with the advent of World Wide Web (WWW), world is being overloaded with huge data. This huge data carries potential information that once extracted, can be used for betterment of humanity. Information from this data can be extracted using manual and automatic analysis. Manual analysis is not scalable and efficient, whereas, the automatic analysis involves computing mechanisms that aid in automatic information extraction over huge amount of data. WWW has also affected overall growth in scientific literature that makes the process of literature review quite laborious, time consuming and cumbersome job for researchers. Hence a dire need is felt to automatically extract potential information out of immense set of scientific articles to automate the process of literature review. Therefore, in this study, aim is to present the overall progress concerning automatic information extraction from scientific articles. The information insights extracted from scientific articles are classified in two broad categories i.e. metadata and key-insights. As available benchmark datasets carry a significant role in overall development in this research domain, existing datasets against both categories are extensively reviewed. Later, research studies in literature that have applied various computational approaches applied on these datasets are consolidated. Major computational approaches in this regard include Rule-based approaches, Hidden Markov Models, Conditional Random Fields, Support Vector Machines, Naive-Bayes classification and Deep Learning approaches. Currently, there are multiple projects going on that are focused towards the dataset construction tailored to specific information needs from scientific articles. Hence, in this study, state-of-the-art regarding information extraction from scientific articles is covered. This study also consolidates evolving datasets as well as various toolkits and code-bases that can be used for information extraction from scientific articles.