As part of the INAS project, we developed this Invasion Biology Thesis Starter Tool (INBIO TST) that helps to identify research hypotheses as well as technical terms and concepts specific to invasion biology in scientific texts. The tool can help students who are not yet knowledgeable in invasion biology, e.g. during initial literature research in the first phase of a PhD thesis. After entering text (e.g. an abstract of a paper about biological invasions), the tool returns a list of hypotheses with probabilities, allowing to find out which major invasion hypotheses this abstract is addressing. Further, the tool can highlight which text passages relate to a focal hypothesis. These features are based on a language model that is calibrated to detect 10 major hypotheses in invasion biology, based on the existing dataset of ca. 1000 publications annotated in the book by (Jeschke & Heger 2018).

An additional feature of the tool is to highlight species names, key invasion biological concepts and habitats. Links to entries in Wikipedia, entries in Ontologies (INBIO, ENVO) and respective definitions are provided. A student freshly starting in the field of invasion biology can use this feature to learn more about these concepts. In a final step, the user receives a graphical representation of a formalised version of the focal hypotheses. In a later version, this could be further developed as an interface that helps develop a refined, own version of the hypothesis of interest.

Try it out here: Thesis Starter Tool