Scientific knowledge is evolving at an unprecedented rate of speed, with new concepts constantly being introduced from millions of academic articles published every month. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised end-to-end system, SciConceptMiner, for the automatic capture of emerging scientific concepts from both independent knowledge sources (semi-structured data) and academic publications (unstructured documents). First, we adopt a BERT-based sequence labeling model to predict candidate concept phrases with self-supervision data. Then, we incorporate rich Web content for synonym detection and concept selection via a web search API. This two-stage approach achieves highly accurate (94.7%) concept identification with more than 740K scientific concepts. These concepts are deployed in the Microsoft Academic production system and are the backbone for its semantic search capability.

We focus on a recently deployed system built for summarizing academic articles by concept tagging. The system has shown great coverage and high accuracy of concept identification which could be contributed by the knowledge acquired from millions of publications. Provided with the interpretable concepts and knowledge encoded in a pre-trained neural model, we investigate whether the tagged concepts can be applied to a broader class of applications. We propose transforming the tagged concepts into sparse vectors as representations of academic documents. The effectiveness of the representations is analyzed theoretically by a proposed framework. We also empirically show that the representations can have advantages on academic topic discovery and paper recommendation. On these applications, we reveal that the knowledge encoded in the tagging system can be effectively utilized and can help infer additional features from data with limited information.