ADAPT Researcher Develops Rapid Search Technology to Reinvent Covid-19 Related Research

12 November 2021

At the recent 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, ADAPT researcher from TU Dublin, Atif Qureshi presented his ground-breaking research in the field of information search around Covid-19. The paper introduced the Rapid Cues Exploratory Search (RCES) technology developed to help life science and healthcare researchers locate relevant papers about Covid-19 in a world where articles are being released quickly and in large volumes.  

The tool was created with the help of a previously developed Explainable Vector-based Embedding (EVE) system and DBpedia as well as MeSH taxonomies. It uses concept relations around Covid-19 to search for papers published in the desired domain with ease and precision. Thus, reinventing the user experience, capabilities and efficiencies of a search engine, previously impossible to envision in this field.  

Commenting about the reason to create the RCES system, an author said: “A unique challenge from an information retrieval point of view was that there was an information overload with articles coming in at a rapid pace. And it was really hard for researchers in the healthcare and life sciences domain to keep up. There was a needle in the haystack problem. How could (researchers) find the correct articles for their need in order to study more about Covid-19?” This inspired the ADAPT researcher Atif Qureshi and his team to find a unique solution that uses previous technologies to create a whole new search experience.

This paper uses core concepts of applied computing, document management, text processing, document searching, search interfaces, interactive retrieval, and others, to innovatively solve a serious issue faced by Covid-19 researchers worldwide. 

Read full research paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3459637.3481990