Tell Me How to Survey: Literature Review Made Simple with Automatic Reading Path Generation

Recent years have witnessed the dramatic growth of paper volumes with plenty of new research papers published every day, especially in the area of computer science. How to glean papers worth reading from the massive literature to do a quick survey or keep up with the latest advancement about a specific research topic has become a challenging task. Existing academic search engines return relevant papers by individually calculating the relevance between each paper and query. However, such systems usually omit the prerequisite chains of a research topic and cannot form a meaningful reading path. In this paper, we introduce a new task named Reading Path Generation (RPG) which aims at automatically producing a path of papers to read for a given query. To serve as a research benchmark, we further propose SurveyBank, a dataset consisting of large quantities of survey papers in the field of computer science as well as their citation relationships. Furthermore, we propose a graph-optimization-based approach for reading path generation which takes the relationship between papers into account. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines. A real-time Reading Path Generation (RePaGer) system has been also implemented with our designed model. Our source code and SurveyBank dataset can be found here (1).

Automated summary

In recent years, the field of computer science has seen a rapid growth in the number of research papers, making it challenging to find valuable ones. This paper introduces a new task called Reading Path Generation (RPG) which automatically generates a path of papers to read for a given query. The proposed graph-optimization-based approach, considering the relationships between papers, outperforms other baselines according to extensive evaluations.