Using Natural Language Processing to Build Graphical Abstracts to be used in Studies Selection Activity in Secondary Studies

Abstract

Context: Secondary studies, as Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) and Systematic Mappings (SMs), have been providing methodological and structured processes to identify and select research evidence in Computer Science, especially in Software Engineering (SE). One of the main activities of a secondary study process is to read the abstracts to decide on including or excluding studies. This activity is considered costly and time-consuming. In order to speed up the selection activity, some alternatives such as, structured abstracts and graphical abstracts (e.g. Concept Maps – CMs), have been proposed. Objective: This study presents an approach to automatically build CMs using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to support the selection activity of secondary studies. Method: First, we proposed an approach composed by two pipelines: (1) perform the triple extraction of concept-relation-concept based on NLP; and (2) attach the extracted triples in a structure used as a template to scientific studies. Second, we evaluated both pipelines conducting experiments. Results: The preliminary evaluation revealed that CMs extracted are coherent when compared with their source text. Conclusions: NLP can assist the automatic construction of CMs. In addition, the experiment results show that the approach can be useful to support researchers in the selection of studies in the selection activity of secondary studies.