Extracting Structured Scholarly Information from the Machine Translation Literature

Understanding the experimental results of a scientific paper is crucial to understanding its contribution and to comparing it with related work. We introduce a structured, queryable representation for experimental results and a baseline system that automatically populates this representation. The representation can answer compositional questions such as: "Which are the best published results reported on the NIST 09 Chinese to English dataset?" and "What are the most important methods for speeding up phrase-based decoding?" Answering such questions usually involves lengthy literature surveys. Current machine reading for academic papers does not usually consider the actual experiments, but mostly focuses on understanding abstracts. We describe annotation work to create an initial hscientific paper; experimental results representationi corpus. The corpus is composed of 67 papers which were manually annotated with a structured representation of experimental results by domain experts. Additionally, we present a baseline algorithm that characterizes the difficulty of the inference task.