SPECTER-Based Semantic Triage of Biomedical Literature for Systematic Reviews in Mutational Signature Analysis
Bituin, R. C.; Bokani, A.
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Systematic reviews in computational biology require screening large heterogeneous bibliographic sets, especially when topics span computational methods, cancer genomics and statistical modelling. This paper presents a reproducible semantic triage pipeline that combines SPECTER scientific-document embeddings, research-question similarity, proposal-summary similarity and domain keyword coverage to rank candidate studies for systematic review screening. The pipeline was evaluated on 2,231 Covidence records, including 120 final included studies (prevalence = 5.38%), against keyword-only, TF-IDF, BM25, MiniLM, PubMedBERT and SPECTER-only baselines. SPECTER-hybrid achieved the highest average precision (AP = 0.546), recovered 50% of included studies after screening 4.48% of records, and produced an 11.16-fold enrichment over prevalence. Ablation analysis showed that semantic-keyword combinations consistently outperformed single-signal variants. These findings suggest that citation-informed hybrid ranking can support literature triage while retaining human reviewers as final decision-makers.
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