AidGrade is starting to use machine learning to help extract data from academic papers for meta-analysis. This is a big deal – meta-analyses tend to go out of date quickly because data extraction is such a time-intensive process and new studies are constantly coming out at an ever-increasing rate.
AidGrade will use its existing database of impact evaluation results to help build and validate models. For each extracted piece of information, it will also generate a probability that the information is correct.
At the very minimum, this will reduce the amount of time it takes to identify key characteristics of studies, such as where they were done and which methods they used. It is also the only way to ensure that meta-analyses are perpetually updated as new studies come out. Given that the methods should be scalable to much of economics, education, and health (think of a ScienceScape (update: now known as Meta) for meta-analysis – they have catalogued 25 million studies, a number which one would definitely need machine learning to process!), it will build this tool in a general way so that its results can be used to inform policy even in developed countries.
To support this, AidGrade has a new crowdfunding campaign. Please share and contribute.