SR-CoMbEr: Heterogeneous Network Embedding Using Community Multi-view Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network for Automating Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews (SRs) are a crucial component of evidence-based clinical practice. Unfortunately, SRs are labor-intensive and unscalable with the exponential growth in literature. Automating evidence synthesis using machine learning models has been proposed but solely focuses on the text and ignores additional features like citation information. Recent work demonstrated that citation embeddings can outperform the text itself, suggesting that better network representation may expedite SRs. Yet, how to utilize the rich information in heterogeneous information networks (HIN) for network embeddings is understudied. Existing HIN models fail to produce a high-quality embedding compared to simply running state-of-the-art homogeneous network models. To address existing HIN model limitations, we propose SR-CoMbEr, a community-based multi-view graph convolutional network for learning better embeddings for evidence synthesis. Our model automatically discovers article communities to learn robust embeddings that simultaneously encapsulate the rich semantics in HINs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model to automate 15 SRs.