PreprintCommunicationVersion 2Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
A Personalized Machine-Learning-enabled Method for Efficient Research in Ethnopharmacology. The case of Southern Balkans and Coastal zone of Asia Minor
Version 1
: Received: 20 April 2021 / Approved: 21 April 2021 / Online: 21 April 2021 (11:49:04 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 21 June 2021 / Approved: 23 June 2021 / Online: 23 June 2021 (11:47:32 CEST)
Axiotis, E.; Kontogiannis, A.; Kalpoutzakis, E.; Giannakopoulos, G. A Personalized Machine-Learning-Enabled Method for Efficient Research in Ethnopharmacology. The Case of the Southern Balkans and the Coastal Zone of Asia Minor. Appl. Sci.2021, 11, 5826.
Axiotis, E.; Kontogiannis, A.; Kalpoutzakis, E.; Giannakopoulos, G. A Personalized Machine-Learning-Enabled Method for Efficient Research in Ethnopharmacology. The Case of the Southern Balkans and the Coastal Zone of Asia Minor. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 5826.
Axiotis, E.; Kontogiannis, A.; Kalpoutzakis, E.; Giannakopoulos, G. A Personalized Machine-Learning-Enabled Method for Efficient Research in Ethnopharmacology. The Case of the Southern Balkans and the Coastal Zone of Asia Minor. Appl. Sci.2021, 11, 5826.
Axiotis, E.; Kontogiannis, A.; Kalpoutzakis, E.; Giannakopoulos, G. A Personalized Machine-Learning-Enabled Method for Efficient Research in Ethnopharmacology. The Case of the Southern Balkans and the Coastal Zone of Asia Minor. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 5826.
Abstract
Ethnopharmacology experts face several challenges when identifying and retrieving documents and resources related to their scientific focus. The volume of sources that need to be monitored, the variety of formats utilized, the different quality of language use across sources, present some of what we call “big data” challenges in the analysis of this data. This study aims to understand if and how experts can be supported effectively through intelligent tools in the task of ethnopharmacological literature research. To this end, we utilize a real case study of ethnopharmacology research, aimed at the Southern Balkans and Coastal zone of Asia Minor. Thus, we propose a methodology for more efficient research in ethnopharmacology. Our work follows an “Expert-Apprentice” paradigm in an automatic URL extraction process, through crawling, where the apprentice is a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm, utilizing a combination of Active Learning (AL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), and the Expert is the human researcher. ML-powered research improved 3.1 times the effectiveness and 5.14 times the efficiency of the domain expert, fetching a total number of 420 relevant ethnopharmacological documents in only 7 hours versus an estimated 36-hour human-expert effort. Therefore, utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to support the researcher can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of the identification and retrieval of appropriate documents.
Keywords
Ethnopharmacology; Artificial Intelligence; Web Crawling; Active Learning; Reinforcement Learning; Text Mining; Big Data
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Commenter: Evangelos Axiotis
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: Author