Getting to the Point: Using AI and Taxonomies to Craft Meta -Titles Travis Hicks, American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Looking to better leverage SEO and include key terms in the url construct for research abstracts, ASCO is working with Access Innovations to evaluate how to programmatically create short titles for abstracts. The idea is to index titles against existing taxonomies as a way of producing a short title that succinctly identified what an abstract is about for purposes of constructing a new url configuration. Travis will discuss the need, challenges, and early results of the project.

1. Getting to the Point
Using Artificial Intelligence and
Taxonomies to Craft Meta-Titles
February 9, 2021

2. What is the American Society of Clinical Oncology?
• Founded in 1964, the American Society of Clinical
Oncology promotes and provides for
o Lifelong learning for oncology professionals,
o Cancer research, and
o An improved environment for oncology practice,
• ASCO represents more than 45,000 oncology
professionals

3. ASCO 3.0 Overview

4. ASCO’s Digital Vision
Provide customers with an intelligent experience, and
by becoming partners in their long term and daily
objectives, deliver outcomes aligned to ASCO’s
strategic goals

5. User-Centric Design
Final direction guided by ASCO’s digital users
• Not based on staff beliefs
• Decisions based in user feedback and testing
• Emphasis on mobile first

6. Experiences Reimagined
• Moving from subject-based organization (sites) to task-based
experiences
Do my job better
Advance my career
Contribute my expertise
Get more involved as a member
Connect with others
• Improved global search across all experiences
• Easily scaled and iterative functionality
• Ongoing data evaluation will drive improvements

7. Overhauling URLs for SEO

8. Importance of URLs for SSO
Search engines derive relevancy from multiple factors
• Clear structure
• Shorter is better than longer
• Strong urls should include—but not overuse—key terms
• Representative of title, where possible
• Human readable, to the greatest extent plausible
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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9. Existing Problem Statement: Abstracts
• Example: https://meetinglibrary.asco.org/record/194499/abstract
• No key words
• Challenge: Length of titles
oAverage: Updated data from alloSHRINK phase I first-in-human study
evaluating CYAD-101, an innovative non-gene edited allogeneic CAR-T
in mCRC
oLong: The association of renal function with safety and efficacy of cisplatin
plus S-1 (CS) therapy and docetaxel plus cisplatin plus S-1 (DCS) therapy in
patients with advanced gastric cancer (AGC): An exploratory analysis of
JCOG1013.
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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10. Strategic Path and Challenges
• New construct: meetings.asco.org/abstracts-
presentations/[ID]/[short-presentation-title]/abstract
• Short-presentation title ideally limited to 60 characters
• Would provide manageable url length with keywords
• Challenge: ASCO published 7,339 abstracts in 2020
 Can’t ask authors
 Can’t ask staff
 No working magic wand (unless you all have one to share)
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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11. Proposal: Extracting Terms from Titles
• Only realistic solution is to programmatically general short titles
• Most important terms needed for url
• Taxonomies contain most important terms
oSubjects
oDrugs
oGenes
oEntities
• Solution: Index titles against taxonomies to extract key words
and compose meta-titles
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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12. Initial Test
• Indexed against ASCO taxonomies (subjects, drugs and
genes) as well as MeSH
• Not a lot of hits across the ASCO taxonomies
• MeSH brought in too many non-relevant terms
• Uncovered missing terms, particularly patient groups
• Highlighted some rules that needed tweaking
• Too maintain 60-character threshold, wanted to use
acronyms
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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13. Second Test
• Ran solely against ASCO taxonomies
• Added body as another source of content
• Somewhat of a mixed bag of results
• More terms identified, but body prioritized over title
• Key terms from the title still not present in meta-title
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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14. Third Test
• Adjusted logic to based on higher weighted terms
• Added additional weight of x3 to any term in title
• Output now uses dash delimited string of words
• Still seeing low-impact terms making it into meta-title
• Existing terms not being indexed
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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15. Work in Progress
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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• Highlighted terms in the title are missing in the indexing
Green highlights are misses that exist in the taxo
Yellow highlights need to be added to the taxos
• Strikethroughs in the new url shouldn’t be present.

16. Next Steps: Just Getting Started
• Experiment with greater de-emphasis on body indexing
• Add new terms and build-out patient groups
• Tweak existing rules
• Keep testing!
• Accept that perfect is the enemy of the good enough
© 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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17. Questions?