Allard Oelen

Gollam Rabby, Sören Auer, Jennifer D'Souza et al.

The increasing amount of published scholarly articles, exceeding 2.5 million yearly, raises the challenge for researchers in following scientific progress. Integrating the contributions from scholarly articles into a novel type of cognitive knowledge graph (CKG) will be a crucial element for accessing and organizing scholarly knowledge, surpassing the insights provided by titles and abstracts. This research focuses on effectively conveying structured scholarly knowledge by utilizing large language models (LLMs) to categorize scholarly articles and describe their contributions in a structured and comparable manner. While previous studies explored language models within specific research domains, the extensive domain-independent knowledge captured by LLMs offers a substantial opportunity for generating structured contribution descriptions as CKGs. Additionally, LLMs offer customizable pathways through prompt engineering or fine-tuning, thus facilitating to leveraging of smaller LLMs known for their efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and environmental considerations. Our methodology involves harnessing LLM knowledge, and complementing it with domain expert-verified scholarly data sourced from a CKG. This strategic fusion significantly enhances LLM performance, especially in tasks like scholarly article categorization and predicate recommendation. Our method involves fine-tuning LLMs with CKG knowledge and additionally injecting knowledge from a CKG with a novel prompting technique significantly increasing the accuracy of scholarly knowledge extraction. We integrated our approach in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), thus enabling precise access to organized scholarly knowledge, crucially benefiting domain-independent scholarly knowledge exchange and dissemination among policymakers, industrial practitioners, and the general public.

Sören Auer, Allard Oelen, Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh et al.

The rapid advancements in Generative AI and Large Language Models promise to transform the way research is conducted, potentially offering unprecedented opportunities to augment scholarly workflows. However, effectively integrating AI into research remains a challenge due to varying domain requirements, limited AI literacy, the complexity of coordinating tools and agents, and the unclear accuracy of Generative AI in research. We present the vision of the TIB AIssistant, a domain-agnostic human-machine collaborative platform designed to support researchers across disciplines in scientific discovery, with AI assistants supporting tasks across the research life cycle. The platform offers modular components - including prompt and tool libraries, a shared data store, and a flexible orchestration framework - that collectively facilitate ideation, literature analysis, methodology development, data analysis, and scholarly writing. We describe the conceptual framework, system architecture, and implementation of an early prototype that demonstrates the feasibility and potential impact of our approach.

Allard Oelen, Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Sören Auer

As the volume of published scholarly literature continues to grow, finding relevant literature becomes increasingly difficult. With the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), new possibilities emerge to find and explore literature. We introduce ASK (Assistant for Scientific Knowledge), an AI-driven scholarly literature search and exploration system that follows a neuro-symbolic approach. ASK aims to provide active support to researchers in finding relevant scholarly literature by leveraging vector search, LLMs, and knowledge graphs. The system allows users to input research questions in natural language and retrieve relevant articles. ASK automatically extracts key information and generates answers to research questions using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. We present an evaluation of ASK, assessing the system's usability and usefulness. Findings indicate that the system is user-friendly and users are generally satisfied while using the system.

Allard Oelen, Sören Auer

The rapidly growing popularity of adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), is having a widespread impact throughout society, including the academic domain. AI-supported research has the potential to support researchers with tasks across the entire research life cycle. In this work, we demonstrate the TIB AIssistant, an AI-supported research platform providing support throughout the research life cycle. The AIssistant consists of a collection of assistants, each responsible for a specific research task. In addition, tools are provided to give access to external scholarly services. Generated data is stored in the assets and can be exported as an RO-Crate bundle to provide transparency and enhance reproducibility of the research project. We demonstrate the AIssistant's main functionalities by means of a sequential walk-through of assistants, interacting with each other to generate sections for a draft research paper. In the end, with the AIssistant, we lay the foundation for a larger agenda of providing a community-maintained platform for AI-supported research.

Azanzi Jiomekong, Hande Küçük McGinty, Keith G. Mills et al.

Despite the growing availability of tools designed to support scholarly knowledge extraction and organization, many researchers still rely on manual methods, sometimes due to unfamiliarity with existing technologies or limited access to domain-adapted solutions. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in scholarly publications across disciplines has made it increasingly difficult to stay current, further underscoring the need for scalable, AI-enabled approaches to structuring and synthesizing scholarly knowledge. Various research communities have begun addressing this challenge independently, developing tools and frameworks aimed at building reliable, dynamic, and queryable scholarly knowledge bases. However, limited interaction across these communities has hindered the exchange of methods, models, and best practices, slowing progress toward more integrated solutions. This manuscript identifies ways to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue, identify shared challenges, categorize new collaboration and shape future research directions in scholarly knowledge and organization.

Lars Vogt, Kheir Eddine Farfar, Pallavi Karanth et al.

Machines need data and metadata to be machine-actionable and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) to manage increasing data volumes. Knowledge graphs and ontologies are key to this, but their use is hampered by high access barriers due to required prior knowledge in semantics and data modelling. The Rosetta Statement approach proposes modeling English natural language statements instead of a mind-independent reality. We propose a metamodel for creating semantic schema patterns for simple statement types. The approach supports versioning of statements and provides a detailed editing history. Each Rosetta Statement pattern has a dynamic label for displaying statements as natural language sentences. Implemented in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) as a use case, this approach allows domain experts to define data schema patterns without needing semantic knowledge. Future plans include combining Rosetta Statements with semantic units to organize ORKG into meaningful subgraphs, improving usability. A search interface for querying statements without needing SPARQL or Cypher knowledge is also planned, along with tools for data entry and display using Large Language Models. The Rosetta Statement metamodel supports a three-step knowledge graph construction procedure. Domain experts can model semantic content without support from ontology engineers by using Wikidata, lowering entry barriers and increasing cognitive interoperability. The second level involves mapping Wikidata terms to established ontologies, and the third step developing semantic graph patterns for reasoning, requiring collaboration with ontology engineers.

Nacira Abbas, Kholoud Alghamdi, Mortaza Alinam et al.

One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of "everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities. This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD) is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached from different perspectives and may require the development of different approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies, procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9 teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG preservation and evolution.

Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Allard Oelen, Kheir Eddine Farfar et al.

Despite improved digital access to scholarly knowledge in recent decades, scholarly communication remains exclusively document-based. In this form, scholarly knowledge is hard to process automatically. In this paper, we present the first steps towards a knowledge graph based infrastructure that acquires scholarly knowledge in machine actionable form thus enabling new possibilities for scholarly knowledge curation, publication and processing. The primary contribution is to present, evaluate and discuss multi-modal scholarly knowledge acquisition, combining crowdsourced and automated techniques. We present the results of the first user evaluation of the infrastructure with the participants of a recent international conference. Results suggest that users were intrigued by the novelty of the proposed infrastructure and by the possibilities for innovative scholarly knowledge processing it could enable.