Rating the Dominance of Concepts in Semantic Taxonomies

Abstract

The descriptive concepts of “semantic” taxonomies are assigned to content items of the publishing domain for supporting a plethora of operations, mostly regarding the organization and discoverability of the content, as well as for recommendation tasks. However, either not all publishers rely on such structures, or in many cases employ their own proprietary taxonomies, thus the content is either difficult to be retrieved by the end users or stored in publisher-specific fragmented “data-silos”, respectively. To address these issues, the modular and scalable “Dominance Metric” methodology is proposed for rating the dominance and importance of concepts in semantic taxonomies. Our proposed metric is applied both on the vast multidisciplinary Microsoft Academic Graph Fields of Study taxonomy and the MeSH controlled vocabulary in order for their enhanced and refined versions to be produced. Moreover, we describe the cleansing process of the resulting taxonomy from Microsoft’s structure by deduplicating concepts and refining the hierarchical relations towards the increase of its representation quality. Our evaluation procedure provided valuable insights by showcasing that high volume, namely the number of publications a concept is assigned to, does not necessarily imply high influence, but the latter is also affected by the structural and topological properties of the individual entities. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.