Narrative Information Access for a Precise and Structured Literature Search

Abstract

The essential component of scientific discourse is the publication of knowledge in stringent lines of arguments. Digital libraries curate these publications in extensive collections and must provide effective access paths to them. However, searching for arguments with keywords is often not precise enough.

In close cooperation between the University Library and the Institute for Information Systems at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, a narrative service is being developed in the Specialized Information Service Pharmacy (in German Fachinformationsdienst Pharmazie) to provide a precise and variable-based search for targeted lines of arguments in scientific literature. The service will be integrated into the central service - the drug-centered search platform PubPharm (www.pubpharm.de).

The narrative service offers a precise search for lines of arguments by allowing users to formulate their queries as relationships between pharmaceutical entities (such as active ingredients, diseases, targets). For example, pharmaceutical mechanisms can be formulated and precisely searched. In addition, the service supports placeholders in the queries that allow users to explore their research field. For example, the service can visualize all drug-disease relationships with associated literature in a structured representation. The narrative service requires a pre-processing of documents, i.e., annotating pharmaceutical entities and extracting relationships between them. The pharmaceutical community is currently evaluating the narrative service. In this paper, we present the technique of our narrative service and discuss its transferability to other domains of various disciplines.