arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Boris Veytsman.
Making scientific papers accessible may require reprocessing old papers to create output compliant with accessibility standards. An important step there is to convert the visual formatting to the logical one. In this report we describe our attempt at zero shot conversion of arXiv papers. Our results are mixed: while it is possible to do conversion, the reliability is not too good. We discuss alternative approaches to this problem.
Despite the importance of scientific software for research, it is often not formally recognized and rewarded. This is especially true for foundational libraries, which are hidden below packages visible to the users (and thus doubly hidden, since even the packages directly used in research are frequently not visible in the paper). Research stakeholders like funders, infrastructure providers, and other organizations need to understand the complex network of computer programs that contemporary research relies upon. In this work, we use the CZ Software Mentions Dataset to map the upstream dependencies of software used in biomedical papers and find the packages critical to scientific software ecosystems. We propose centrality metrics for the network of software dependencies, analyze three ecosystems (PyPi, CRAN, Bioconductor), and determine the packages with the highest centrality.
We consider a random field $ϕ(\mathbf{r})$ in $d$ dimensions which is largely concentrated around small `hotspots', with `weights', $w_i$. These weights may have a very broad distribution, such that their mean does not exist, or else is not a useful estimate. In such cases, the median $\overline W$ of the total weight $W$ in a region of size $R$ is an informative characterisation of the weights. We define the function $F$ by $\ln \overline W=F(\ln R)$. If $F'(x)>d$, the distribution of hotspots is dominated by the largest weights. In the case where $F'(x)-d$ approaches a constant positive value when $R\to \infty$, the hotspots distribution has a type of scale-invariance which is different from that of fractal sets, and which we term \emph{ultradimensional}. The form of the function $F(x)$ is determined for a model of diffusion in a random potential.
We describe the CZ Software Mentions dataset, a new dataset of software mentions in biomedical papers. Plain-text software mentions are extracted with a trained SciBERT model from several sources: the NIH PubMed Central collection and from papers provided by various publishers to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The dataset provides sources, context and metadata, and, for a number of mentions, the disambiguated software entities and links. We extract 1.12 million unique string software mentions from 2.4 million papers in the NIH PMC-OA Commercial subset, 481k unique mentions from the NIH PMC-OA Non-Commercial subset (both gathered in October 2021) and 934k unique mentions from 3 million papers in the Publishers' collection. There is variation in how software is mentioned in papers and extracted by the NER algorithm. We propose a clustering-based disambiguation algorithm to map plain-text software mentions into distinct software entities and apply it on the NIH PubMed Central Commercial collection. Through this methodology, we disambiguate 1.12 million unique strings extracted by the NER model into 97600 unique software entities, covering 78% of all software-paper links. We link 185000 of the mentions to a repository, covering about 55% of all software-paper links. We describe in detail the process of building the datasets, disambiguating and linking the software mentions, as well as opportunities and challenges that come with a dataset of this size. We make all data and code publicly available as a new resource to help assess the impact of software (in particular scientific open source projects) on science.
Accurate parsing of citation reference strings is crucial to automatically construct scholarly databases such as Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar. Citation field extraction (CFE) is precisely this task---given a reference label which tokens refer to the authors, venue, title, editor, journal, pages, etc. Most methods for CFE are supervised and rely on training from labeled datasets that are quite small compared to the great variety of reference formats. BibTeX, the widely used reference management tool, provides a natural method to automatically generate and label training data for CFE. In this paper, we describe a technique for using BibTeX to generate, automatically, a large-scale 41M labeled strings), labeled dataset, that is four orders of magnitude larger than the current largest CFE dataset, namely the UMass Citation Field Extraction dataset [Anzaroot and McCallum, 2013]. We experimentally demonstrate how our dataset can be used to improve the performance of the UMass CFE using a RoBERTa-based [Liu et al., 2019] model. In comparison to previous SoTA, we achieve a 24.48% relative error reduction, achieving span level F1-scores of 96.3%.
We propose a simple model of pathologic microsatellite expansion, and describe an inherent self-repairing mechanism working against expansion. We prove that if the probabilities of elementary expansions and contractions are equal, microsatellite expansions are always self-repairing. If these probabilities are different, self-reparation does not work. Mosaicism, anticipation and reverse mutation cases are discussed in the framework of the model. We explain these phenomena and provide some theoretical evidence for their properties, for example the rarity of reverse mutations.