Phrase indexing and the identification of related academic research content

Work to automate the identification of related articles in corpora of academic research content is described. Pairs of related articles are recognised on the basis of the phrases they contain, using a similarity measure that emphasizes the importance of phrase overlap. Phrases are weighted according to their significance, evaluated in terms of statistical under- or over-representation relative to corpus-level frequency, and the significance scores of n-grams with higher n values are boosted. The measure proves broadly effective at identifying meaningfully related pairs of content items and may provide a useful basis for the development of ‘see also’-type functionality.