Academic search engines allow scientists to explore related work relevant to a given query. Often, the user is also aware of the aspect to retrieve a relevant document. In such cases, existing search engines can be used by expanding the query with terms describing that aspect. However, this approach does not guarantee good results since plain keyword matches do not always imply relevance. To address this issue, we define and solve a novel academic search task, called aspect-based retrieval, which allows the user to specify the aspect along with the query to retrieve a ranked list of relevant documents. The primary idea is to estimate a language model for the aspect as well as the query using a domain-specific knowledge base and use a mixture of the two to determine the relevance of the article. Our evaluation of the results over the Open Research Corpus dataset shows that our method outperforms keyword-based expansion of query with aspect with and without relevance feedback.
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