Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS) of the Old Dominion University organized a Hackathon from October 24 to November 1, 2024. The competition featured three teams from the master's category and three from the PhD category, each presenting innovative projects. Participants chose from five research topics provided by the organizing committee. Two teams from the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group participated in the hackathon: Binary Bandits ( David Calano and Dominik Soos ) and our team, Titans ( Himarsha Jayanetti , Kritika Garg , and Kumushini Thennakoon ).  We won the PhD category with our project, "Tracking Political Trends Around the US Presidential Election.” This was a mini project completed within a limited time frame, making it a fast-paced challenge. Despite the constraints, our team tackled various obstacles in collecting and analyzing data. In this blog post, we provide an overview of our project and highlight its key contribution...

It has become common practice to include open access datasets and software (OADS) in computational research publications. Emily Escamilla , discusses the increasing trends of including web and software repository platforms in scholarly publications in her One in Five arXiv Articles Reference GitHub blog. OADS are essential resources for replicating computational experiments and making the work more transparent. OADS are also crucial for building repositories that support computational reproducibility. The process of manually examining a large number of research papers in order to extract URLs linking to OADS is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Thus an automatic approach should be adopted to identify and extract OADS-URLs (URLs linking to OADS) from scientific papers. We proposed a hybrid OADSClasssifier consisting of a heuristic and a supervised learning model to identify OADS-URLs in a research paper automatically. The classifier achieves a best F1 of 0.92. The source code is av...