Helping NIH Find Reviewers for Proposal
Kareem
Darwish
The KEVRIC Company
At NIH, incoming grant proposals are evaluated by Study Sections, which are
panels of 18 to 20 experts, who are chosen based on their research interests or
scientific disciplines. Each study
section is headed by Scientific Review Administrator (SRA) who receives the
proposals assigned to his or her study section and is tasked with appropriately
identifying members of his study sections or external reviewers who will be fit
to review an incoming proposal. In doing
so, they perform one or more of six distinct tasks, namely to identify
reviewers or to identify existing publications and their authors based on the
text of an incoming proposal, a profile of a reviewer or author, or a manually
constructed user query.
The presentation will focus on three aspects of the problem:
1. Adapting an existing dataset to test the different functions performed by SRA's. This includes constructing reviewer or author profiles.
2. Examine the effect of using controlled vocabularies and manually entered metadata to enhance search effectiveness.
3. The
effect of document length normalization on retrieval effectiveness.
For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational
Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting
with the speaker, please contact Doug
Oard (oard@umiacs.umd.edu).