Mining and Analyzing the Future Works in Scientific Articles

Future works in scientific articles are valuable for researchers and they can guide researchers to new research directions or ideas. In this paper, we mine the future works in scientific articles in order to 1) provide an insight for future work analysis and 2) facilitate researchers to search and browse future works in a research area. First, we study the problem of future work extraction and propose a regular expression based method to address the problem. Second, we define four different categories for the future works by observing the data and investigate the multi-class future work classification problem. Third, we apply the extraction method and the classification model to a paper dataset in the computer science field and conduct a further analysis of the future works. Finally, we design a prototype system to search and demonstrate the future works mined from the scientific papers. Our evaluation results show that our extraction method can get high precision and recall values and our classification model can also get good results and it outperforms several baseline models. Further analysis of the future work sentences also indicates interesting results.