/faculty-search

Faculty Search is an innovative tool designed to streamline the process of identifying domain experts within the UW-Madison research community.

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Semantic Embedding Search for Researcher & Paper Discovery

Faculty Search is an innovative tool designed to streamline the process of identifying domain experts within the UW-Madison research community. Utilizing state-of-the-art Language Model (LLM) embeddings, this platform offers a semantic-driven search experience. It meticulously analyzes a researcher's entire publication history, factoring in the recency and number of citations to ensure the most relevant and authoritative experts are suggested. Faculty Search stands out with its versatile input options: users can initiate searches using basic text descriptions, URLs of topic-specific web pages, or even PDF files related to their area of interest. This robust and intuitive tool is tailored to connect users with the most pertinent academic expertise, enhancing research collaborations and knowledge discovery at UW-Madison. Visit the Faculty Search website to learn more.

Purposes

  • Create a search process to identify individuals with specific research interests.
  • Illustrate the connections between people and their published works.
  • Utilize research papers as the starting point for searches, and provide relevant individuals and papers within the UW community.

Features

  • Search for authors and articles based on research relevancy. For searching authors, there is an option to weight the results based on the number of relevant articles they have published.
  • Visualize a search query, authors, and articles in the same 2d space.
  • A REST API end-point to access the search function programmatically.
Details

Step-by-step detail

Creating a vector store:

  1. Retrieve all users from the community map.
  2. Query the ORCID profiles of each user to obtain their journal articles.
  3. Extract the abstracts of the journal articles from the CrossRef database.
  4. Generate embeddings by combining the article title and abstract (if available) using OpenAI's embedding model.
  5. Calculate the centroid of author embeddings by taking the average of the embeddings from all their articles.

Searching articles:

  1. Accept a search query.
  2. Embed the search query using OpenAI's embedding model (text-embedding-ada-002).
  3. Retrieve documents ranked from most similar to least similar based on cosine similarity.

Searching authors:

  1. Accept a search query.
  2. Embed the search query using OpenAI's embedding model (text-embedding-ada-002).
  3. Retrieve authors ranked from most similar to least similar based on cosine similarity.

Weighed authors search:

  1. Use search(type='article') to create a pool of n matching documents.
  2. Count the appearance of authors among the matching documents.
  3. Return the top_k authors with the highest appearance counts.

Visualization:

  1. Obtain embeddings for the articles related to the search query.
  2. Append the embeddings of all authors.
  3. Append the embeddings of the search query.
  4. Apply t-SNE (t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) on all the embeddings to reduce dimensionality and create a 2D representation.
  5. Plot a scatter plot in the 2D t-SNE space. With query, authors, and articles as different colors on the same space.
  6. Add some interactivity for ease of use.