A new evaluation methodology for literature-based discovery systems

While medical researchers formulate new hypotheses to test, they need to identify connections to their work from other parts of the medical literature. However, the current volume of information has become a great barrier for this task. Recently, many literature-based discovery (LBD) systems have been developed to help researchers identify new knowledge that bridges gaps across distinct sections of the medical literature. Each LBD system uses different methods for mining the connections from text and ranking the identified connections, but none of the currently available LBD evaluation approaches can be used to compare the effectiveness of these methods. In this paper, we present an evaluation methodology for LBD systems that allows comparisons across different systems. We demonstrate the abilities of our evaluation methodology by using it to compare the performance of different correlation-mining and ranking approaches used by existing LBD systems. This evaluation methodology should help other researchers compare approaches, make informed algorithm choices, and ultimately help to improve the performance of LBD systems overall.