Neural Rankers for Effective Screening Prioritisation in Medical Systematic Review Literature Search

Medical systematic reviews typically require assessing all the documents retrieved by a search. The reason is two-fold: the task aims for “total recall”; and documents retrieved using Boolean search are an unordered set, and thus it is unclear how an assessor could examine only a subset. Screening prioritisation is the process of ranking the (unordered) set of retrieved documents, allowing assessors to begin the downstream processes of the systematic review creation earlier, leading to earlier completion of the review, or even avoiding screening documents ranked least relevant.