Enrico Motta

Angelo Salatino, Tanay Aggarwal, Andrea Mannocci et al.

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), such as term lists, thesauri, taxonomies, and ontologies, play a fundamental role in categorising, managing, and retrieving information. In the academic domain, KOSs are often adopted for representing research areas and their relationships, primarily aiming to classify research articles, academic courses, patents, books, scientific venues, domain experts, grants, software, experiment materials, and several other relevant products and agents. These structured representations of research areas, widely embraced by many academic fields, have proven effective in empowering AI-based systems to i) enhance retrievability of relevant documents, ii) enable advanced analytic solutions to quantify the impact of academic research, and iii) analyse and forecast research dynamics. This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey of the current KOS for academic disciplines. We analysed and compared 45 KOSs according to five main dimensions: scope, structure, curation, usage, and links to other KOSs. Our results reveal a very heterogeneous scenario in terms of scope, scale, quality, and usage, highlighting the need for more integrated solutions for representing research knowledge across academic fields. We conclude by discussing the main challenges and the most promising future directions.

Massimiliano Fadda, Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne et al.

News sources play a central role in democratic societies by shaping political and social discourse through specific topics, viewpoints and voices. Understanding these dynamics is essential for assessing whether the media landscape offers a balanced and fair account of public debate. In earlier work, we introduced a pipeline that, given a news corpus, i) uses a hybrid human-machine approach to identify the range of viewpoints expressed about a given topic, and ii) classifies relevant claims with respect to the identified viewpoints, defined as sets of semantically and ideologically congruent claims (e.g., positions arguing that immigration positively impacts the UK economy). In this paper, we improve this pipeline by i) fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for viewpoint classification and ii) enriching claim representations with semantic descriptions of relevant actors drawn from Wikidata. We evaluate our approach against alternative solutions on a benchmark centred on the UK immigration debate. Results show that while both mechanisms independently improve classification performance, their integration yields the best results, particularly when using LLMs capable of processing long inputs.

Michael McCoubrey, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne et al.

In recent years, there has been a growing use of generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, to support both the assessment and generation of scientific work. Although some studies have shown that LLMs can, to a certain extent, evaluate research according to perceived quality, our understanding of the internal mechanisms that enable this capability remains limited. This paper presents the first study that investigates how LLMs encode the concept of scientific quality through relevant monosemantic features extracted using sparse autoencoders. We derive such features under different experimental settings and assess their ability to serve as predictors across three tasks related to research quality: predicting citation count, journal SJR, and journal h-index. The results indicate that LLMs encode features associated with multiple dimensions of scientific quality. In particular, we identify four recurring types of features that capture key aspects of how research quality is represented: 1) features reflecting research methodologies; 2) features related to publication type, with literature reviews typically exhibiting higher impact; 3) features associated with high-impact research fields and technologies; and 4) features corresponding to specific scientific jargons. These findings represent an important step toward understanding how LLMs encapsulate concepts related to research quality.

Francisco Bolaños, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne et al.

Previous work has demonstrated that AI methods for analysing scientific literature benefit significantly from annotating sentences in papers according to their rhetorical roles, such as research gaps, results, limitations, extensions of existing methodologies, and others. Such representations also have the potential to support the development of a new generation of systems capable of producing high-quality literature reviews. However, achieving this goal requires the definition of a relevant annotation schema and effective strategies for large-scale annotation of the literature. This paper addresses these challenges by 1) introducing a novel annotation schema specifically designed to support literature review generation and 2) conducting a comprehensive evaluation of a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in classifying rhetorical roles according to this schema. To this end, we also present Sci-Sentence, a novel multidisciplinary benchmark comprising 700 sentences manually annotated by domain experts and 2,240 sentences automatically labelled using LLMs. We evaluate 37 LLMs on this benchmark, spanning diverse model families and sizes, using both zero-shot learning and fine-tuning approaches. The experiments yield several novel insights that advance the state of the art in this challenging domain. First, the current generation of LLMs performs remarkably well on this task when fine-tuned on high-quality data, achieving performance levels above 96\% F1. Second, while large proprietary models like GPT-4o achieve the best results, some lightweight open-source alternatives also demonstrate excellent performance. Finally, enriching the training data with semi-synthetic examples generated by LLMs proves beneficial, enabling small encoders to achieve robust results and significantly enhancing the performance of several open decoder models.

Andrea Cadeddu, Alessandro Chessa, Vincenzo De Leo et al.

In 2012, the United Nations introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at creating a more sustainable and improved future by 2030. However, tracking progress toward these goals is difficult because of the extensive scale and complexity of the data involved. Text classification models have become vital tools in this area, automating the analysis of vast amounts of text from a variety of sources. Additionally, large language models (LLMs) have recently proven indispensable for many natural language processing tasks, including text classification, thanks to their ability to recognize complex linguistic patterns and semantics. This study analyzes various proprietary and open-source LLMs for a single-label, multi-class text classification task focused on the SDGs. Then, it also evaluates the effectiveness of task adaptation techniques (i.e., in-context learning approaches), namely Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning, as well as Fine-Tuning within this domain. The results reveal that smaller models, when optimized through prompt engineering, can perform on par with larger models like OpenAI's GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

Francisco Bolanos, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne et al.

This manuscript presents a comprehensive review of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs). A SLR is a rigorous and organised methodology that assesses and integrates previous research on a given topic. Numerous tools have been developed to assist and partially automate the SLR process. The increasing role of AI in this field shows great potential in providing more effective support for researchers, moving towards the semi-automatic creation of literature reviews. Our study focuses on how AI techniques are applied in the semi-automation of SLRs, specifically in the screening and extraction phases. We examine 21 leading SLR tools using a framework that combines 23 traditional features with 11 AI features. We also analyse 11 recent tools that leverage large language models for searching the literature and assisting academic writing. Finally, the paper discusses current trends in the field, outlines key research challenges, and suggests directions for future research.

Tanay Aggarwal, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne et al.

Ontologies of research topics are crucial for structuring scientific knowledge, enabling scientists to navigate vast amounts of research, and forming the backbone of intelligent systems such as search engines and recommendation systems. However, manual creation of these ontologies is expensive, slow, and often results in outdated and overly general representations. As a solution, researchers have been investigating ways to automate or semi-automate the process of generating these ontologies. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify semantic relationships between different research topics, which is a critical step in the development of such ontologies. To this end, we developed a gold standard based on the IEEE Thesaurus to evaluate the task of identifying four types of relationships between pairs of topics: broader, narrower, same-as, and other. Our study evaluates the performance of seventeen LLMs, which differ in scale, accessibility (open vs. proprietary), and model type (full vs. quantised), while also assessing four zero-shot reasoning strategies. Several models have achieved outstanding results, including Mixtral-8x7B, Dolphin-Mistral-7B, and Claude 3 Sonnet, with F1-scores of 0.847, 0.920, and 0.967, respectively. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that smaller, quantised models, when optimised through prompt engineering, can deliver performance comparable to much larger proprietary models, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources.

Tanay Aggarwal, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne et al.

Ontologies and taxonomies of research fields are critical for managing and organising scientific knowledge, as they facilitate efficient classification, dissemination and retrieval of information. However, the creation and maintenance of such ontologies are expensive and time-consuming tasks, usually requiring the coordinated effort of multiple domain experts. Consequently, ontologies in this space often exhibit uneven coverage across different disciplines, limited inter-domain connectivity, and infrequent updating cycles. In this study, we investigate the capability of several large language models to identify semantic relationships among research topics within three academic domains: biomedicine, physics, and engineering. The models were evaluated under three distinct conditions: zero-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and fine-tuning on existing ontologies. Additionally, we assessed the cross-domain transferability of fine-tuned models by measuring their performance when trained in one domain and subsequently applied to a different one. To support this analysis, we introduce PEM-Rel-8K, a novel dataset consisting of over 8,000 relationships extracted from the most widely adopted taxonomies in the three disciplines considered in this study: MeSH, PhySH, and IEEE. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on PEM-Rel-8K yields excellent performance across all disciplines.

Mojtaba Nayyeri, Gokce Muge Cil, Sahar Vahdati et al.

The incompleteness of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is a crucial issue affecting the quality of AI-based services. In the scholarly domain, KGs describing research publications typically lack important information, hindering our ability to analyse and predict research dynamics. In recent years, link prediction approaches based on Knowledge Graph Embedding models became the first aid for this issue. In this work, we present Trans4E, a novel embedding model that is particularly fit for KGs which include N to M relations with N$\gg$M. This is typical for KGs that categorize a large number of entities (e.g., research articles, patents, persons) according to a relatively small set of categories. Trans4E was applied on two large-scale knowledge graphs, the Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA) and Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), for completing the information about Fields of Study (e.g., 'neural networks', 'machine learning', 'artificial intelligence'), and affiliation types (e.g., 'education', 'company', 'government'), improving the scope and accuracy of the resulting data. We evaluated our approach against alternative solutions on AIDA, MAG, and four other benchmarks (FB15k, FB15k-237, WN18, and WN18RR). Trans4E outperforms the other models when using low embedding dimensions and obtains competitive results in high dimensions.

Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam et al.

Classifying research papers according to their research topics is an important task to improve their retrievability, assist the creation of smart analytics, and support a variety of approaches for analysing and making sense of the research environment. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a comprehensive ontology of re-search areas in the field of Computer Science. The CSO Classifier takes as input the metadata associated with a research paper (title, abstract, keywords) and returns a selection of research concepts drawn from the ontology. The approach was evaluated on a gold standard of manually annotated articles yielding a significant improvement over alternative methods.

Agnese Chiatti, Gianluca Bardaro, Enrico Motta et al.

Service robots are expected to reliably make sense of complex, fast-changing environments. From a cognitive standpoint, they need the appropriate reasoning capabilities and background knowledge required to exhibit human-like Visual Intelligence. In particular, our prior work has shown that the ability to reason about spatial relations between objects in the world is a key requirement for the development of Visually Intelligent Agents. In this paper, we present a framework for commonsense spatial reasoning which is tailored to real-world robotic applications. Differently from prior approaches to qualitative spatial reasoning, the proposed framework is robust to variations in the robot's viewpoint and object orientation. The spatial relations in the proposed framework are also mapped to the types of commonsense predicates used to describe typical object configurations in English. In addition, we also show how this formally-defined framework can be implemented in a concrete spatial database.

Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne, Aliaksandr Birukou et al.

Identifying the research topics that best describe the scope of a scientific publication is a crucial task for editors, in particular because the quality of these annotations determine how effectively users are able to discover the right content in online libraries. For this reason, Springer Nature, the world's largest academic book publisher, has traditionally entrusted this task to their most expert editors. These editors manually analyse all new books, possibly including hundreds of chapters, and produce a list of the most relevant topics. Hence, this process has traditionally been very expensive, time-consuming, and confined to a few senior editors. For these reasons, back in 2016 we developed Smart Topic Miner (STM), an ontology-driven application that assists the Springer Nature editorial team in annotating the volumes of all books covering conference proceedings in Computer Science. Since then STM has been regularly used by editors in Germany, China, Brazil, India, and Japan, for a total of about 800 volumes per year. Over the past three years the initial prototype has iteratively evolved in response to feedback from the users and evolving requirements. In this paper we present the most recent version of the tool and describe the evolution of the system over the years, the key lessons learnt, and the impact on the Springer Nature workflow. In particular, our solution has drastically reduced the time needed to annotate proceedings and significantly improved their discoverability, resulting in 9.3 million additional downloads. We also present a user study involving 9 editors, which yielded excellent results in term of usability, and report an evaluation of the new topic classifier used by STM, which outperforms previous versions in recall and F-measure.

Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Francesco Osborne, Aliaksandr Birukou et al.

Major academic publishers need to be able to analyse their vast catalogue of products and select the best items to be marketed in scientific venues. This is a complex exercise that requires characterising with a high precision the topics of thousands of books and matching them with the interests of the relevant communities. In Springer Nature, this task has been traditionally handled manually by publishing editors. However, the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications and the dynamic nature of the Computer Science landscape has made this solution increasingly inefficient. We have addressed this issue by creating Smart Book Recommender (SBR), an ontology-based recommender system developed by The Open University (OU) in collaboration with Springer Nature, which supports their Computer Science editorial team in selecting the products to market at specific venues. SBR recommends books, journals, and conference proceedings relevant to a conference by taking advantage of a semantically enhanced representation of about 27K editorial products. This is based on the Computer Science Ontology, a very large-scale, automatically generated taxonomy of research areas. SBR also allows users to investigate why a certain publication was suggested by the system. It does so by means of an interactive graph view that displays the topic taxonomy of the recommended editorial product and compares it with the topic-centric characterization of the input conference. An evaluation carried out with seven Springer Nature editors and seven OU researchers has confirmed the effectiveness of the solution.

Danilo Dessì, Francesco Osborne, Diego Reforgiato Recupero et al.

The continuous growth of scientific literature brings innovations and, at the same time, raises new challenges. One of them is related to the fact that its analysis has become difficult due to the high volume of published papers for which manual effort for annotations and management is required. Novel technological infrastructures are needed to help researchers, research policy makers, and companies to time-efficiently browse, analyse, and forecast scientific research. Knowledge graphs i.e., large networks of entities and relationships, have proved to be effective solution in this space. Scientific knowledge graphs focus on the scholarly domain and typically contain metadata describing research publications such as authors, venues, organizations, research topics, and citations. However, the current generation of knowledge graphs lacks of an explicit representation of the knowledge presented in the research papers. As such, in this paper, we present a new architecture that takes advantage of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning methods for extracting entities and relationships from research publications and integrates them in a large-scale knowledge graph. Within this research work, we i) tackle the challenge of knowledge extraction by employing several state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Text Mining tools, ii) describe an approach for integrating entities and relationships generated by these tools, iii) show the advantage of such an hybrid system over alternative approaches, and vi) as a chosen use case, we generated a scientific knowledge graph including 109,105 triples, extracted from 26,827 abstracts of papers within the Semantic Web domain. As our approach is general and can be applied to any domain, we expect that it can facilitate the management, analysis, dissemination, and processing of scientific knowledge.

Agnese Chiatti, Enrico Motta, Enrico Daga et al.

Service robots can help with many of our daily tasks, especially in those cases where it is inconvenient or unsafe for us to intervene: e.g., under extreme weather conditions or when social distance needs to be maintained. However, before we can successfully delegate complex tasks to robots, we need to enhance their ability to make sense of dynamic, real world environments. In this context, the first prerequisite to improving the Visual Intelligence of a robot is building robust and reliable object recognition systems. While object recognition solutions are traditionally based on Machine Learning methods, augmenting them with knowledge based reasoners has been shown to improve their performance. In particular, based on our prior work on identifying the epistemic requirements of Visual Intelligence, we hypothesise that knowledge of the typical size of objects could significantly improve the accuracy of an object recognition system. To verify this hypothesis, in this paper we present an approach to integrating knowledge about object sizes in a ML based architecture. Our experiments in a real world robotic scenario show that this combined approach ensures a significant performance increase over state of the art Machine Learning methods.

Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne, Enrico Motta

Ontologies of research areas have been proven to be useful in many application for analysing and making sense of scholarly data. In this chapter, we present the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), which is the largest ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science, and discuss a number of applications that build on CSO, to support high-level tasks, such as topic classification, metadata extraction, and recommendation of books.

Agnese Chiatti, Enrico Motta, Enrico Daga

A key capability required by service robots operating in real-world, dynamic environments is that of Visual Intelligence, i.e., the ability to use their vision system, reasoning components and background knowledge to make sense of their environment. In this paper, we analyze the epistemic requirements for Visual Intelligence, both in a top-down fashion, using existing frameworks for human-like Visual Intelligence in the literature, and from the bottom up, based on the errors emerging from object recognition trials in a real-world robotic scenario. Finally, we use these requirements to evaluate current knowledge bases for Service Robotics and to identify gaps in the support they provide for Visual Intelligence. These gaps provide the basis of a research agenda for developing more effective knowledge representations for Visual Intelligence.

Francesco Osborne, Henry Muccini, Patricia Lago et al.

Context. Systematic Reviews (SRs) are means for collecting and synthesizing evidence from the identification and analysis of relevant studies from multiple sources. To this aim, they use a well-defined methodology meant to mitigate the risks of biases and ensure repeatability for later updates. SRs, however, involve significant effort. Goal. The goal of this paper is to introduce a novel methodology that reduces the amount of manual tedious tasks involved in SRs while taking advantage of the value provided by human expertise. Method. Starting from current methodologies for SRs, we replaced the steps of keywording and data extraction with an automatic methodology for generating a domain ontology and classifying the primary studies. This methodology has been applied in the Software Engineering sub-area of Software Architecture and evaluated by human annotators. Results. The result is a novel Expert-Driven Automatic Methodology, EDAM, for assisting researchers in performing SRs. EDAM combines ontology-learning techniques and semantic technologies with the human-in-the-loop. The first (thanks to automation) fosters scalability, objectivity, reproducibility and granularity of the studies; the second allows tailoring to the specific focus of the study at hand and knowledge reuse from domain experts. We evaluated EDAM on the field of Software Architecture against six senior researchers. As a result, we found that the performance of the senior researchers in classifying papers was not statistically significantly different from EDAM. Conclusions. Thanks to automation of the less-creative steps in SRs, our methodology allows researchers to skip the tedious tasks of keywording and manually classifying primary studies, thus freeing effort for the analysis and the discussion.

Andrea Mannocci, Francesco Osborne, Enrico Motta

In this paper we focus on the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) as a domain of analysis, to gain insights about its evolution in the past 50 years and what this evolution tells us about the research landscape associated with the journal. To this purpose we use techniques from the field of Science of Science and analyse the relevant scholarly data to identify a variety of phenomena, including significant geopolitical patterns, the key trends that emerge from a topic-centric analysis, and the insights that can be drawn from an analysis of citation data. Because the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has always been a central focus for IJHCS, we also include in the analysis the CHI conference, which is the premiere scientific venue in HCI. Analysing both venues provides more data points to our study and allows us to consider two alternative viewpoints on the evolution of HCI research.