Using topic analysis techniques to support comprehensive research paper searches

In an academic paper search to confirm the originality of a user's research, it is important that the search returns comprehensive results relevant to the user's information need. To achieve comprehensive search results, users often relax initially restrictive search formula by adding synonyms and expressions similar to the search words with operator OR, and/or replacing AND with OR operations. However, it is difficult to anticipate all the terms that authors of relevant papers might have used. In addition, the replacement of AND with OR in search phrases can return a large number of unrelated papers. To overcome these issues, we propose a research paper search method based on topic analysis, which uses Boolean search based on the topics assigned to the search words in the search formula and the abstracts that contain any search word. Our method considers synonyms and expressions similar to the search words, which a user might not anticipate, while limiting the number of papers unrelated to the information need in the search result. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted experiments using the NTCIR-1 and 2 datasets, and confirmed that our method shows a reduction effect on unrelated papers, while maintaining high coverage.