Jan22 '17

with Zhe Yu, NC State

What

FASTREAD is a project designated to reduce effort of finding relevant research papers with active learning algorithms.

Why

Literature reviews are essential for any researcher trying to keep up to date with the burgeoning software engineering literature. Finding relevant papers can be hard due to the huge amount of candidates provided by search.

How

Our current results show that FASTREAD can

  • reduce the effort of finding relevant papers to about 1/10 by sacrifising 0.05 recall;
  • estimate the number of remaining relevant papers yet to be found—which in practical settings can be used to decide if the reviewing process needs to be terminated;
  • correct a majority of human errors without imposing too much extra cost.

The tool is available online here.