Crowdsourcing fact extraction from scientific literature

Abstract

Scientific publications constitute an extremely valuable body of knowledge and can be seen as the roots of our civilisation. However, with the exponential growth of written publications, comparing facts and findings between different research groups and communities becomes nearly impossible. In this paper, we present a conceptual approach and a first implementation for creating an open knowledge base of scientific knowledge mined from research publications. This requires to extract facts - mostly empirical observations - from unstructured texts (mainly PDF's). Due to the importance of extracting facts with high-accuracy and the impreciseness of automatic methods, human quality control is of utmost importance. In order to establish such quality control mechanisms, we rely on intelligent visual interfaces and on establishing a toolset for crowdsourcing fact extraction, text mining and data integration tasks. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.