A hybrid intelligent approach for the support of higher education students in literature discovery

Abstract

In this paper, we present a hybrid intelligent approach that combines knowledge engineering, machine learning, and human intervention to automatically recommend literature resources relevant for a high quality of literature discovery. The primary target group that we aim to support is higher education students in their first experiences with research works. The approach builds a knowledge graph by leveraging a logistic regression algorithm which is first parameterized and then influenced by the interventions of a supervisor and a student, respectively. Both interventions allow continuous learning based on both the supervisor’s preferences (e.g. high score of H-index) and the student’s feedback to the resulting literature resources. The creation of the hybrid intelligent approach followed the Design-Science Research methodology and is instantiated in a working prototype named PaperZen. The evaluation was conducted in two complementary ways: (1) by showing how the design requirements manifest in the prototype, and (2) with an illustrative scenario in which a corpus of a research project was taken as a source of truth. A small subset from the corpus was entered into the PaperZen and Google Scholar, independently. The resulting literature resources were compared with the corpus of a research project and show that PaperZen outperforms Google Scholar