New scientific concepts, interpreted broadly, are continuously introduced in the literature, but relatively few concepts have a long‐term impact on society. The identification of such concepts is a challenging prediction task that would help multiple parties—including researchers and the general public—focus their attention within the vast scientific literature. In this paper we present a system that predicts the future impact of a scientific concept, represented as a technical term, based on the information available from recently published research articles. We analyze the usefulness of rich features derived from the full text of the articles through a variety of approaches, including rhetorical sentence analysis, information extraction, and time‐series analysis. The results from two large‐scale experiments with 3.8 million full‐text articles and 48 million metadata records support the conclusion that full‐text features are significantly more useful for prediction than metadata‐only features and that the most accurate predictions result from combining the metadata and full‐text features. Surprisingly, these results hold even when the metadata features are available for a much larger number of documents than are available for the full‐text features.

This paper proposes a space-efficient, discriminatively enhanced topic model: a V structured topic model with an embedded log-linear component. The discriminative log-linear component reduces the number of parameters to be learnt while outperforming baseline generative models. At the same time, the explanatory power of the generative component is not compromised. We establish its superiority over a purely generative model by applying it to two different ranking tasks: (a) In the first task, we look at the problem of proposing alternative citations given textual and bibliographic evidence. We solve it as a ranking problem in itself and as a platform for further qualitative analysis of convergence of scientific phenomenon. (b) In the second task we address the problem of ranking potential email recipients based on email content and sender information.

Researchers and scientists increasingly find themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. Our goal is to effectively serve this need by using bibliometric text mining and summarization techniques to generate summaries of scientific literature. We show how we can use citations to produce automatically generated, readily consumable, technical extractive summaries. We first propose C-LexRank, a model for summarizing single scientific articles based on citations, which employs community detection and extracts salient information-rich sentences. Next, we further extend our experiments to summarize a set of papers, which cover the same scientific topic. We generate extractive summaries of a set of Question Answering (QA) and Dependency Parsing (DP) papers, their abstracts, and their citation sentences and show that citations have unique information amenable to creating a summary.

Graded models of word meaning in context characterize the meaning of individual usages (occurrences) without reference to dictionary senses. We introduce a novel approach that frames the task of computing word meaning in context as a probabilistic inference problem. The model represents the meaning of a word as a probability distribution over potential paraphrases, inferred using an undirected graphical model. Evaluated on paraphrasing tasks, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance.