PositionRank: An Unsupervised Approach to Keyphrase Extraction from Scholarly Documents

The large and growing amounts of online scholarly data present both challenges and opportunities to enhance knowledge discovery. One such challenge is to automatically extract a small set of keyphrases from a document that can accurately describe the document{'}s content and can facilitate fast information processing. In this paper, we propose PositionRank, an unsupervised model for keyphrase extraction from scholarly documents that incorporates information from all positions of a word{'}s occurrences into a biased PageRank. Our model obtains remarkable improvements in performance over PageRank models that do not take into account word positions as well as over strong baselines for this task. Specifically, on several datasets of research papers, PositionRank achieves improvements as high as 29.09{\%}.