WikiCSSH: Extracting Computer Science Subject Headings from Wikipedia

Domain-specific classification schemas (or subject heading vocabularies) are often used to identify, classify, and disambiguate concepts that occur in scholarly articles. In this work, we develop, apply, and evaluate a human-in-the-loop workflow that first extracts an initial category tree from crowd-sourced Wikipedia data, and then combines community detection, machine learning, and hand-crafted heuristics or rules to prune the initial tree. This work resulted in WikiCSSH; a large-scale, hierarchically-organized subject heading vocabulary for the domain of computer science (CS). Our evaluation suggests that WikiCSSH outperforms alternative CS vocabularies in terms of coverage of CS terms that occur in research articles. WikiCSSH can further distinguish between coarse-grained versus fine-grained CS concepts. The outlined workflow can serve as a template for building hierarchically-organized subject heading vocabularies for other domains that are covered in Wikipedia.