JSI colloquia are prestigious scientific events at the “Jožef Stefan” Institute, where top lecturers present their research achievements. Colloquia have a long tradition and an international reputation.

Methods for semi-automated hypothesis generation from scientific literature: an open science approach

The rapid growth of scientific publications makes it difficult to manually review and keep up to date with new research findings. Literature-based discovery (LBD) is a field of artificial intelligence at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, which enables semi-automated hypothesis generation by discovering new associations between previously unconnected scientific sources. In the lecture, we will present a selection of approaches and methods from our recently published monograph Bisociative Literature-Based Discovery: Methods with Tutorials in Python (Springer, 2025). We will present also a collection of Python notebooks that facilitate the reproducibility of procedures for data acquisition, text processing, hypothesis generation and their evaluation, in alignment with the principles of open science.

About the lecturers: Nada Lavrač is a scientific councilor at the Jožef Stefan Institute and a full professor at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School. Bojan Cestnik is the director of the computer engineering company Temida, a researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute and a full professor at the School of Engineering and Management of the University of Nova Gorica. Andrej Kastrin is a researcher at the Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, and a lecturer at this faculty.