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The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

markusstrasser.org

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Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#11

Post by i000 »

When I was in grad school, I joined a startup incubator and build a prototype which combined two of the tools mentioned in the article: "a query builder (by demonstration)" and "A paper recommender system", a simple companion which would help scientist to not miss relevant research to them. This was 10 years ago, before Google Scholar has similar features.

The incubator introduced me to advisors with business experience in this field. And I got told in no uncertain terms what is the gist of this article: The value lies in the molecular and clinical data. In 2021 I would add digital pathology / imaging data.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#12

Post by amcoastal »

civilized wrote: post #4

Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"? - Is the information that makes science actually work mostly in images that the machines don't yet understand? - Was the information paywalled or in private databases and inaccessible to this researcher? - Are the papers mostly just advertisements for researc…

Try: Paperswithcode.com

If its not there I won't use it! If you dont provide code with your paper it better have a really useful concept in it otherwise not citation. Which beckons to the problem in the article where most important information in basic research papers is: "Hey, this concept works" as opposed to a rigorous test of exactly what makes the concept work and how to use it in other situations.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#14

Post by anyfactor »

> Why purchase access to a 3rd party AI reading engine or a knowledge graph when you can just hire hundreds of postdocs in Hyderabad to parse papers into JSON? (at a $6,000 yearly salary)

I really like jobs people think AI can do in theory but can't really do them effectively irl. Where do I get a part-time gig like that if I think I am capable of reviewing and creating summary of non-STEM papers? Except for homeworks and assignments of course.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#15

Post by a_bonobo »

bryanph_ wrote: post #3

One thing that strikes me about most academic knowledge tools is that they seem to focus on parsing the current set of academic literature and producing supposedly interesting insights out of them (which quickly tends to snowball into wanting some kind of generalized model for knowledge as a whole). What I think is much more interesting is creating tools that help people create better academic writing in the first pl…

As an ECR with English as a second language, the paid version of Grammarly has clarified my writing quite a bit. I think there's more unexplored value in this space.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#16

Post by cousin_it »

I can confirm that in my current area of interest (how to synthesize a cello or saxophone sound), there are hundreds of academic papers published over decades, each of them says "our method sounds more realistic than others", but code and audio samples are never available, and verbal descriptions always skip crucial details. I have no doubt that academics have a ton of expertise, but their output in paper form is basically unusable, I'm not sure it achieves any purpose besides resume padding. Reading a forum of synth hobbyists is a hundred times more useful.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#17

Post by javajosh »

Don't know much about this industry but yes, it feels like one of those industries that sprang up because one person with money said, "Hmm, sounds like a good idea," and then other people with money and FOMO joined in. When this happens past a certain level you get a miniature innovation bubble (MIB)!

(At least MIBs are rather harmless, at least in the long run, and can actually yield some benefit: innovative people are drawn to these types of industries and inevitably create cool things as a by-product of their work.)

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#18

Post by acomjean »

A lot of papers are hand or computer assisted annotated.

For medical papers Mesh terms: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html

Gene information is extracted by flybase/ worm base …

It’s time consuming, expensive probably not perfect but for certain types of papers it makes searching better.

Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications

#19

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

civilized wrote: post #4

Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"? - Is the information that makes science actually work mostly in images that the machines don't yet understand? - Was the information paywalled or in private databases and inaccessible to this researcher? - Are the papers mostly just advertisements for researc…

I can't speak for biomedicine, but speaking as an academic in CS the claim that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web" looks like a huge hyperbole to me.

It's true that the so-called "folk knowledge", knowledge that exists in the community but no one bothers to publish in the form of papers, is a real problem, but at least in my field, it's by no means the majority of knowledge.

As someone from a peripheral university where you can't just drive a few miles and talk to the best in your field, I have successfully started in new subfields of study (getting to the level of writing research papers in top-tier venues) by reading the literature.

While this essay provides a very interesting point of view, I suspect it's heavily colored by the authors' failure to monetize the technology (which is related to the fact that people doing most of the grunt research work, who would benefit the most for this, are PhD students and postdocs who have no money to pay for it - in the text, the author hints at this). I wouldn't take it as an accurate description of academia.

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