Literature Filtering for Systematic Reviews with Transformers

Abstract

Identifying critical research within the growing body of academic work is an essential element of quality research. Systematic review processes, used in evidence-based medicine, formalise this as a procedure that must be followed in a research program. However, it comes with an increasing burden in terms of the time required to identify the important articles of research for a given topic. In this work, we develop a method for building a general-purpose filtering system that matches a research question, posed as a natural language description of the required content, against a candidate set of articles obtained via the application of broad search terms. Our results demonstrate that transformer models, pre-trained on biomedical literature then fine tuned for the specific task, offer a promising solution to this problem. The model can remove large volumes of irrelevant articles for most research questions.