Michael Färber

Tarek Saier, Johan Krause, Michael Färber

Large-scale data sets on scholarly publications are the basis for a variety of bibliometric analyses and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Especially data sets derived from publication's full-text have recently gained attention. While several such data sets already exist, we see key shortcomings in terms of their domain and time coverage, citation network completeness, and representation of full-text content. To address these points, we propose a new version of the data set unarXive. We base our data processing pipeline and output format on two existing data sets, and improve on each of them. Our resulting data set comprises 1.9 M publications spanning multiple disciplines and 32 years. It furthermore has a more complete citation network than its predecessors and retains a richer representation of document structure as well as non-textual publication content such as mathematical notation. In addition to the data set, we provide ready-to-use training/test data for citation recommendation and IMRaD classification. All data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/unarXive.

Nicholas Popovic, Michael Färber

We present FREDo, a few-shot document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) benchmark. As opposed to existing benchmarks which are built on sentence-level relation extraction corpora, we argue that document-level corpora provide more realism, particularly regarding none-of-the-above (NOTA) distributions. Therefore, we propose a set of FSDLRE tasks and construct a benchmark based on two existing supervised learning data sets, DocRED and sciERC. We adapt the state-of-the-art sentence-level method MNAV to the document-level and develop it further for improved domain adaptation. We find FSDLRE to be a challenging setting with interesting new characteristics such as the ability to sample NOTA instances from the support set. The data, code, and trained models are available online (https://github.com/nicpopovic/FREDo).

Nicholas Popovic, Walter Laurito, Michael Färber

In this paper, we present an end-to-end joint entity and relation extraction approach based on transformer-based language models. We apply the model to the task of linking mathematical symbols to their descriptions in LaTeX documents. In contrast to existing approaches, which perform entity and relation extraction in sequence, our system incorporates information from relation extraction into entity extraction. This means that the system can be trained even on data sets where only a subset of all valid entity spans is annotated. We provide an extensive evaluation of the proposed system and its strengths and weaknesses. Our approach, which can be scaled dynamically in computational complexity at inference time, produces predictions with high precision and reaches 3rd place in the leaderboard of SemEval-2022 Task 12. For inputs in the domain of physics and math, it achieves high relation extraction macro F1 scores of 95.43% and 79.17%, respectively. The code used for training and evaluating our models is available at: https://github.com/nicpopovic/RE1st

Tarek Saier, Youxiang Dong, Michael Färber

In the wake of information overload in academia, methodologies and systems for search, recommendation, and prediction to aid researchers in identifying relevant research are actively studied and developed. Existing work, however, is limited in terms of granularity, focusing only on the level of papers or a single type of artifact, such as data sets. To enable more holistic analyses and systems dealing with academic publications and their content, we propose CoCon, a large scholarly data set reflecting the combined use of research artifacts, contextualized in academic publications' full-text. Our data set comprises 35 k artifacts (data sets, methods, models, and tasks) and 340 k publications. We additionally formalize a link prediction task for "combined research artifact use prediction" and provide code to utilize analyses of and the development of ML applications on our data. All data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/contextgraph.

Michael Färber, David Lamprecht, Johan Krause et al.

We present SemOpenAlex, an extensive RDF knowledge graph that contains over 26 billion triples about scientific publications and their associated entities, such as authors, institutions, journals, and concepts. SemOpenAlex is licensed under CC0, providing free and open access to the data. We offer the data through multiple channels, including RDF dump files, a SPARQL endpoint, and as a data source in the Linked Open Data cloud, complete with resolvable URIs and links to other data sources. Moreover, we provide embeddings for knowledge graph entities using high-performance computing. SemOpenAlex enables a broad range of use-case scenarios, such as exploratory semantic search via our website, large-scale scientific impact quantification, and other forms of scholarly big data analytics within and across scientific disciplines. Additionally, it enables academic recommender systems, such as recommending collaborators, publications, and venues, including explainability capabilities. Finally, SemOpenAlex can serve for RDF query optimization benchmarks, creating scholarly knowledge-guided language models, and as a hub for semantic scientific publishing.

Tanja Aue, Adam Jatowt, Michael Färber

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) engagement of companies moved into the focus of public attention over recent years. With the requirements of compulsory reporting being implemented and investors incorporating sustainability in their investment decisions, the demand for transparent and reliable ESG ratings is increasing. However, automatic approaches for forecasting ESG ratings have been quite scarce despite the increasing importance of the topic. In this paper, we build a model to predict ESG ratings from news articles using the combination of multivariate timeseries construction and deep learning techniques. A news dataset for about 3,000 US companies together with their ratings is also created and released for training. Through the experimental evaluation we find out that our approach provides accurate results outperforming the state-of-the-art, and can be used in practice to support a manual determination or analysis of ESG ratings.

David Faragó, Michael Färber, Christian Petrov

Commit messages (CMs) are an essential part of version control. By providing important context in regard to what has changed and why, they strongly support software maintenance and evolution. But writing good CMs is difficult and often neglected by developers. So far, there is no tool suitable for practice that automatically assesses how well a CM is written, including its meaning and context. Since this task is challenging, we ask the research question: how well can the CM quality, including semantics and context, be measured with machine learning methods? By considering all rules from the most popular CM quality guideline, creating datasets for those rules, and training and evaluating state-of-the-art machine learning models to check those rules, we can answer the research question with: sufficiently well for practice, with the lowest F$_1$ score of 82.9\%, for the most challenging task. We develop a full-fledged open-source framework that checks all these CM quality rules. It is useful for research, e.g., automatic CM generation, but most importantly for software practitioners to raise the quality of CMs and thus the maintainability and evolution speed of their software.

Shuzhou Yuan, Michael Färber

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely employed for graph-to-text generation tasks. However, the process of finetuning LLMs requires significant training resources and annotation work. In this paper, we explore the capability of generative models to generate descriptive text from graph data in a zero-shot setting. Specifically, we evaluate GPT-3 and ChatGPT on two graph-to-text datasets and compare their performance with that of finetuned LLM models such as T5 and BART. Our results demonstrate that generative models are capable of generating fluent and coherent text, achieving BLEU scores of 10.57 and 11.08 for the AGENDA and WebNLG datasets, respectively. However, our error analysis reveals that generative models still struggle with understanding the semantic relations between entities, and they also tend to generate text with hallucinations or irrelevant information. As a part of error analysis, we utilize BERT to detect machine-generated text and achieve high macro-F1 scores. We have made the text generated by generative models publicly available.

Michael Färber, Melissa Coutinho, Shuzhou Yuan

With the remarkable increase in the number of scientific entities such as publications, researchers, and scientific topics, and the associated information overload in science, academic recommender systems have become increasingly important for millions of researchers and science enthusiasts. However, it is often overlooked that these systems are subject to various biases. In this article, we first break down the biases of academic recommender systems and characterize them according to their impact and prevalence. In doing so, we distinguish between biases originally caused by humans and biases induced by the recommender system. Second, we provide an overview of methods that have been used to mitigate these biases in the scholarly domain. Based on this, third, we present a framework that can be used by researchers and developers to mitigate biases in scholarly recommender systems and to evaluate recommender systems fairly. Finally, we discuss open challenges and possible research directions related to scholarly biases.

Michael Färber, Jannik Schwade, Adam Jatowt

Determining and measuring diversity in news articles is important for a number of reasons, including preventing filter bubbles and fueling public discourse, especially before elections. So far, the identification and analysis of diversity have been illuminated in a variety of ways, such as measuring the overlap of words or topics between news articles related to US elections. However, the question of how diversity in news articles can be measured holistically, i.e., with respect to (1) variety, (2) balance, and (3) disparity, considering individuals, parties, and topics, has not been addressed. In this paper, we present a framework for determining diversity in news articles according to these dimensions. Furthermore, we create and provide a dataset of Google Top Stories, encompassing more than 26,000 unique headlines from more than 900 news outlets collected within two weeks before and after the 2021 German federal election. While we observe high diversity for more general search terms (e.g., "election"), a range of search terms ("education," "Europe," "climate protection," "government") resulted in news articles with high diversity in two out of three dimensions. This reflects a more subjective, dedicated discussion on rather future-oriented topics.

Michael Färber, Lazaros Tampakis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most momentous technologies of our time. Thus, it is of major importance to know which stakeholders influence AI research. Besides researchers at universities and colleges, researchers in companies have hardly been considered in this context. In this article, we consider how the influence of companies on AI research can be made measurable on the basis of scientific publishing activities. We compare academic- and company-authored AI publications published in the last decade and use scientometric data from multiple scholarly databases to look for differences across these groups and to disclose the top contributing organizations. While the vast majority of publications is still produced by academia, we find that the citation count an individual publication receives is significantly higher when it is (co-)authored by a company. Furthermore, using a variety of altmetric indicators, we notice that publications with company participation receive considerably more attention online. Finally, we place our analysis results in a broader context and present targeted recommendations to safeguard a harmonious balance between academia and industry in the realm of AI research.

Tarek Saier, Mayumi Ohta, Takuto Asakura et al.

Automatic extraction of information from publications is key to making scientific knowledge machine readable at a large scale. The extracted information can, for example, facilitate academic search, decision making, and knowledge graph construction. An important type of information not covered by existing approaches is hyperparameters. In this paper, we formalize and tackle hyperparameter information extraction (HyperPIE) as an entity recognition and relation extraction task. We create a labeled data set covering publications from a variety of computer science disciplines. Using this data set, we train and evaluate BERT-based fine-tuned models as well as five large language models: GPT-3.5, GALACTICA, Falcon, Vicuna, and WizardLM. For fine-tuned models, we develop a relation extraction approach that achieves an improvement of 29% F1 over a state-of-the-art baseline. For large language models, we develop an approach leveraging YAML output for structured data extraction, which achieves an average improvement of 5.5% F1 in entity recognition over using JSON. With our best performing model we extract hyperparameter information from a large number of unannotated papers, and analyze patterns across disciplines. All our data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/hyperpie

Michael Färber, David Lamprecht

In this paper, we introduce Linked Papers With Code (LPWC), an RDF knowledge graph that provides comprehensive, current information about almost 400,000 machine learning publications. This includes the tasks addressed, the datasets utilized, the methods implemented, and the evaluations conducted, along with their results. Compared to its non-RDF-based counterpart Papers With Code, LPWC not only translates the latest advancements in machine learning into RDF format, but also enables novel ways for scientific impact quantification and scholarly key content recommendation. LPWC is openly accessible at https://linkedpaperswithcode.com and is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. As a knowledge graph in the Linked Open Data cloud, we offer LPWC in multiple formats, from RDF dump files to a SPARQL endpoint for direct web queries, as well as a data source with resolvable URIs and links to the data sources SemOpenAlex, Wikidata, and DBLP. Additionally, we supply knowledge graph embeddings, enabling LPWC to be readily applied in machine learning applications.

Yuni Susanti, Michael Färber

Causal discovery aims to estimate causal structures among variables based on observational data. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a fresh perspective to tackle the causal discovery problem by reasoning on the metadata associated with variables rather than their actual data values, an approach referred to as knowledge-based causal discovery. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of Small Language Models (SLMs, defined as LLMs with fewer than 1 billion parameters) with prompt-based learning for knowledge-based causal discovery. Specifically, we present KG Structure as Prompt, a novel approach for integrating structural information from a knowledge graph, such as common neighbor nodes and metapaths, into prompt-based learning to enhance the capabilities of SLMs. Experimental results on three types of biomedical and open-domain datasets under few-shot settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing most baselines and even conventional fine-tuning approaches trained on full datasets. Our findings further highlight the strong capabilities of SLMs: in combination with knowledge graphs and prompt-based learning, SLMs demonstrate the potential to surpass LLMs with larger number of parameters. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub.

Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber

Streaming text generation has become a common way of increasing the responsiveness of language model powered applications, such as chat assistants. At the same time, extracting semantic information from generated text is a useful tool for applications such as automated fact checking or retrieval augmented generation. Currently, this requires either separate models during inference, which increases computational cost, or destructive fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, we propose an approach called EMBER which enables streaming named entity recognition in decoder-only language models without fine-tuning them and while incurring minimal additional computational cost at inference time. Specifically, our experiments show that EMBER maintains high token generation rates, with only a negligible decrease in speed of around 1% compared to a 43.64% slowdown measured for a baseline. We make our code and data available online, including a toolkit for training, testing, and deploying efficient token classification models optimized for streaming text generation.

Shuzhou Yuan, William LaCroix, Hardik Ghoshal et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed as AI tutors due to their scalability and potential for personalized instruction. However, off-the-shelf LLMs often underperform in educational settings: they frequently reveal answers too readily, fail to adapt their responses to student uncertainty, and remain vulnerable to emotionally manipulative prompts. To address these challenges, we introduce CoDAE, a framework that adapts LLMs for educational use through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data augmentation. We collect real-world dialogues between students and a ChatGPT-based tutor and enrich them using CoT prompting to promote step-by-step reasoning and pedagogically aligned guidance. Furthermore, we design targeted dialogue cases to explicitly mitigate three key limitations: over-compliance, low response adaptivity, and threat vulnerability. We fine-tune four open-source LLMs on different variants of the augmented datasets and evaluate them in simulated educational scenarios using both automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge assessments. Our results show that models fine-tuned with CoDAE deliver more pedagogically appropriate guidance, better support reasoning processes, and effectively resist premature answer disclosure.

Yuni Susanti, Michael Färber

Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs is crucial for understanding multivariate interactions in complex systems. Knowledge-based causal discovery -- which involves inferring causal relationships by reasoning over the metadata of variables (e.g., names or textual context) -- offers a compelling alternative to traditional methods that rely on observational data. However, existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce unstable and inconsistent results, compromising their reliability for causal inference. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to enhance knowledge-based causal discovery. Our approach identifies informative metapath-based subgraphs within KGs and further refines the selection of these subgraphs using Learning-to-Rank-based models. The top-ranked subgraphs are then incorporated into zero-shot prompts, improving the effectiveness of LLMs in inferring the causal relationship. Extensive experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most baselines by up to 44.4 points in F1 scores, evaluated across diverse LLMs and KGs. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub: https://github.com/susantiyuni/path-to-causality

Shuzhou Yuan, Ercong Nie, Mario Tawfelis et al.

Hate speech detection is a socially sensitive and inherently subjective task, with judgments often varying based on personal traits. While prior work has examined how socio-demographic factors influence annotation, the impact of personality traits on Large Language Models (LLMs) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on the role of persona prompts in hate speech classification, focusing on MBTI-based traits. A human annotation survey confirms that MBTI dimensions significantly affect labeling behavior. Extending this to LLMs, we prompt four open-source models with MBTI personas and evaluate their outputs across three hate speech datasets. Our analysis uncovers substantial persona-driven variation, including inconsistencies with ground truth, inter-persona disagreement, and logit-level biases. These findings highlight the need to carefully define persona prompts in LLM-based annotation workflows, with implications for fairness and alignment with human values.

Michael Färber, David Lamprecht, Yuni Susanti

In this paper, we introduce AutoRDF2GML, a framework designed to convert RDF data into data representations tailored for graph machine learning tasks. AutoRDF2GML enables, for the first time, the creation of both content-based features -- i.e., features based on RDF datatype properties -- and topology-based features -- i.e., features based on RDF object properties. Characterized by automated feature extraction, AutoRDF2GML makes it possible even for users less familiar with RDF and SPARQL to generate data representations ready for graph machine learning tasks, such as link prediction, node classification, and graph classification. Furthermore, we present four new benchmark datasets for graph machine learning, created from large RDF knowledge graphs using our framework. These datasets serve as valuable resources for evaluating graph machine learning approaches, such as graph neural networks. Overall, our framework effectively bridges the gap between the Graph Machine Learning and Semantic Web communities, paving the way for RDF-based machine learning applications.

Michael Färber, David Lamprecht, Yuni Susanti

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have substantially advanced the field of recommender systems. However, despite the creation of more than a thousand knowledge graphs (KGs) under the W3C standard RDF, their rich semantic information has not yet been fully leveraged in GNN-based recommender systems. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive integration of RDF KGs with GNNs that utilizes both the topological information from RDF object properties and the content information from RDF datatype properties. Our main focus is an in-depth evaluation of various GNNs, analyzing how different semantic feature initializations and types of graph structure heterogeneity influence their performance in recommendation tasks. Through experiments across multiple recommendation scenarios involving multi-million-node RDF graphs, we demonstrate that harnessing the semantic richness of RDF KGs significantly improves recommender systems and lays the groundwork for GNN-based recommender systems for the Linked Open Data cloud. The code and data are available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/davidlamprecht/rdf-gnn-recommendation

Raphael Gruber, Abdelrahman Abdallah, Michael Färber et al.

We introduce \textsc{ComplexTempQA},\footnote{Dataset and code available at: https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/ComplexTempQA} a large-scale dataset consisting of over 100 million question-answer pairs designed to tackle the challenges in temporal question answering. \textsc{ComplexTempQA} significantly surpasses existing benchmarks in scale and scope. Utilizing Wikipedia and Wikidata, the dataset covers questions spanning over two decades and offers an unmatched scale. We introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes questions as \textit{attributes}, \textit{comparisons}, and \textit{counting} questions, revolving around events, entities, and time periods, respectively. A standout feature of \textsc{ComplexTempQA} is the high complexity of its questions, which demand reasoning capabilities for answering such as across-time comparison, temporal aggregation, and multi-hop reasoning involving temporal event ordering and entity recognition. Additionally, each question is accompanied by detailed metadata, including specific time scopes, allowing for comprehensive evaluation of temporal reasoning abilities of large language models.

Michael Färber, Nicholas Popovic

In this paper, we propose Vocab-Expander at https://vocab-expander.com, an online tool that enables end-users (e.g., technology scouts) to create and expand a vocabulary of their domain of interest. It utilizes an ensemble of state-of-the-art word embedding techniques based on web text and ConceptNet, a common-sense knowledge base, to suggest related terms for already given terms. The system has an easy-to-use interface that allows users to quickly confirm or reject term suggestions. Vocab-Expander offers a variety of potential use cases, such as improving concept-based information retrieval in technology and innovation management, enhancing communication and collaboration within organizations or interdisciplinary projects, and creating vocabularies for specific courses in education.

Bolei Ma, Ercong Nie, Shuzhou Yuan et al.

Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied to multilingual pretrained language models for zero-shot cross-lingual understanding. However, most previous studies primarily focused on sentence-level classification tasks, and only a few considered token-level labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. In this paper, we propose Token-Level Prompt Decomposition (ToPro), which facilitates the prompt-based method for token-level sequence labeling tasks. The ToPro method decomposes an input sentence into single tokens and applies one prompt template to each token. Our experiments on multilingual NER and POS tagging datasets demonstrate that ToPro-based fine-tuning outperforms Vanilla fine-tuning and Prompt-Tuning in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, especially for languages that are typologically different from the source language English. Our method also attains state-of-the-art performance when employed with the mT5 model. Besides, our exploratory study in multilingual large language models shows that ToPro performs much better than the current in-context learning method. Overall, the performance improvements show that ToPro could potentially serve as a novel and simple benchmarking method for sequence labeling tasks.

Shuzhou Yuan, Ercong Nie, Bolei Ma et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess outstanding capabilities in addressing various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the sheer size of these models poses challenges in terms of storage, training and inference due to the inclusion of billions of parameters through layer stacking. While traditional approaches such as model pruning or distillation offer ways for reducing model size, they often come at the expense of performance retention. In our investigation, we systematically explore the approach of reducing the number of layers in LLMs. Surprisingly, we observe that even with fewer layers, LLMs maintain similar or better performance levels, particularly in prompt-based fine-tuning for text classification tasks. Remarkably, in certain cases, models with a single layer outperform their fully layered counterparts. These findings offer valuable insights for future work aimed at mitigating the size constraints of LLMs while preserving their performance, thereby opening avenues for significantly more efficient use of LLMs.

Shuzhou Yuan, Ercong Nie, Michael Färber et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities when prompts with demonstrations are used. However, fine-tuning still remains crucial to further enhance their adaptability. Prompt-based fine-tuning proves to be an effective fine-tuning method in low-data scenarios, but high demands on computing resources limit its practicality. We address this issue by introducing a prompt-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach. GNNavi leverages insights into ICL's information flow dynamics, which indicates that label words act in prompts as anchors for information propagation. GNNavi employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) layer to precisely guide the aggregation and distribution of information flow during the processing of prompts by hardwiring the desired information flow into the GNN. Our experiments on text classification tasks with GPT-2 and Llama2 show GNNavi surpasses standard prompt-based fine-tuning methods in few-shot settings by updating just 0.2% to 0.5% of parameters. We compare GNNavi with prevalent PEFT approaches, such as prefix tuning, LoRA and Adapter in terms of performance and efficiency. Our analysis reveals that GNNavi enhances information flow and ensures a clear aggregation process.

Yuni Susanti, Michael Färber

Causal discovery traditionally relies on statistical methods applied to observational data, often requiring large datasets and assumptions about underlying causal structures. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced new possibilities for causal discovery by providing domain expert knowledge. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs can effectively process observational data for causal discovery. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs for data-driven causal discovery by integrating observational data for LLM-based reasoning. Specifically, we examine whether LLMs can effectively utilize observational data through two prompting strategies: pairwise prompting and breadth first search (BFS)-based prompting. In both approaches, we incorporate the observational data directly into the prompt to assess LLMs' ability to infer causal relationships from such data. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that incorporating observational data enhances causal discovery, boosting F1 scores by up to 0.11 point using both pairwise and BFS LLM-based prompting, while outperforming traditional statistical causal discovery baseline by up to 0.52 points. Our findings highlight the potential and limitations of LLMs for data-driven causal discovery, demonstrating their ability to move beyond textual metadata and effectively interpret and utilize observational data for more informed causal reasoning. Our studies lays the groundwork for future advancements toward fully LLM-driven causal discovery.

Shuzhou Yuan, Ercong Nie, Lukas Kouba et al.

Detoxification, the task of rewriting harmful language into non-toxic text, has become increasingly important amid the growing prevalence of toxic content online. However, high-quality parallel datasets for detoxification, especially for hate speech, remain scarce due to the cost and sensitivity of human annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop pipeline leveraging GPT-4o-mini for automated detoxification. We first replicate the ParaDetox pipeline by replacing human annotators with an LLM and show that the LLM performs comparably to human annotation. Building on this, we construct ParaDeHate, a large-scale parallel dataset specifically for hatespeech detoxification. We release ParaDeHate as a benchmark of over 8K hate/non-hate text pairs and evaluate a wide range of baseline methods. Experimental results show that models such as BART, fine-tuned on ParaDeHate, achieve better performance in style accuracy, content preservation, and fluency, demonstrating the effectiveness of LLM-generated detoxification text as a scalable alternative to human annotation.

Shuzhou Yuan, Jingyi Sun, Ran Zhang et al.

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are commonly used to provide plausible free-text explanations of a model's reasoning about its predictions. However, recent work has questioned their faithfulness, as they may not accurately reflect the model's internal reasoning process regarding its predicted answer. In contrast, highlight explanations--input fragments critical for the model's predicted answers--exhibit measurable faithfulness. Building on this foundation, we propose G-Tex, a Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation framework designed to enhance the faithfulness of NLEs. Specifically, highlight explanations are first extracted as faithful cues reflecting the model's reasoning logic toward answer prediction. They are subsequently encoded through a graph neural network layer to guide the NLE generation, which aligns the generated explanations with the model's underlying reasoning toward the predicted answer. Experiments on T5 and BART using three reasoning datasets show that G-Tex improves NLE faithfulness by up to 12.18% compared to baseline methods. Additionally, G-Tex generates NLEs with greater semantic and lexical similarity to human-written ones. Human evaluations show that G-Tex can decrease redundant content and enhance the overall quality of NLEs. Our work presents a novel method for explicitly guiding NLE generation to enhance faithfulness, serving as a foundation for addressing broader criteria in NLE and generated text.

Shuzhou Yuan, Michael Färber

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) benefit from external knowledge stored in graph structures for various downstream tasks. However, bridging the modality gap between graph structures and text remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods like linearizing graphs for PLMs lose vital graph connectivity, whereas Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) require cumbersome processes for integration into PLMs. In this work, we propose a novel graph-guided self-attention mechanism, GraSAME. GraSAME seamlessly incorporates token-level structural information into PLMs without necessitating additional alignment or concatenation efforts. As an end-to-end, lightweight multimodal module, GraSAME follows a multi-task learning strategy and effectively bridges the gap between graph and textual modalities, facilitating dynamic interactions between GNNs and PLMs. Our experiments on the graph-to-text generation task demonstrate that GraSAME outperforms baseline models and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on WebNLG datasets. Furthermore, compared to SOTA models, GraSAME eliminates the need for extra pre-training tasks to adjust graph inputs and reduces the number of trainable parameters by over 100 million.

Zhan Qu, Daniel Gomm, Michael Färber

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) are widely used to model dynamic systems where relationships and features evolve over time. Although TGNNs demonstrate strong predictive capabilities in these domains, their complex architectures pose significant challenges for explainability. Counterfactual explanation methods provide a promising solution by illustrating how modifications to input graphs can influence model predictions. To address this challenge, we present CoDy, Counterfactual Explainer for Dynamic Graphs, a model-agnostic, instance-level explanation approach that identifies counterfactual subgraphs to interpret TGNN predictions. CoDy employs a search algorithm that combines Monte Carlo Tree Search with heuristic selection policies, efficiently exploring a vast search space of potential explanatory subgraphs by leveraging spatial, temporal, and local event impact information. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art factual and counterfactual baselines demonstrate CoDy's effectiveness, with improvements of 16% in AUFSC+ over the strongest baseline.

Tobias Schreieder, Tim Schopf, Michael Färber

The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) has been accompanied by growing concerns regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. As a result, a growing body of research focuses on evidence-based text generation with LLMs, aiming to link model outputs to supporting evidence to ensure traceability and verifiability. However, the field is fragmented due to inconsistent terminology, isolated evaluation practices, and a lack of unified benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyze 134 papers, introduce a unified taxonomy of evidence-based text generation with LLMs, and investigate 300 evaluation metrics across seven key dimensions. Thereby, we focus on approaches that use citations, attribution, or quotations for evidence-based text generation. Building on this, we examine the distinctive characteristics and representative methods in the field. Finally, we highlight open challenges and outline promising directions for future work.

Ines Besrour, Jingbo He, Tobias Schreieder et al.

We present SQuAI (https://squai.scads.ai/), a scalable and trustworthy multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for scientific question answering (QA) with large language models (LLMs). SQuAI addresses key limitations of existing RAG systems in the scholarly domain, where complex, open-domain questions demand accurate answers, explicit claims with citations, and retrieval across millions of scientific documents. Built on over 2.3 million full-text papers from arXiv.org, SQuAI employs four collaborative agents to decompose complex questions into sub-questions, retrieve targeted evidence via hybrid sparse-dense retrieval, and adaptively filter documents to improve contextual relevance. To ensure faithfulness and traceability, SQuAI integrates in-line citations for each generated claim and provides supporting sentences from the source documents. Our system improves faithfulness, answer relevance, and contextual relevance by up to +0.088 (12%) over a strong RAG baseline. We further release a benchmark of 1,000 scientific question-answer-evidence triplets to support reproducibility. With transparent reasoning, verifiable citations, and domain-wide scalability, SQuAI demonstrates how multi-agent RAG enables more trustworthy scientific QA with LLMs.

Konrad Löhr, Shuzhou Yuan, Michael Färber

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integral to information dissemination and decision-making processes. Given their growing societal influence, understanding potential biases, particularly within the political domain, is crucial to prevent undue influence on public opinion and democratic processes. This work investigates political bias and stereotype propagation across eight prominent LLMs using the two-dimensional Political Compass Test (PCT). Initially, the PCT is employed to assess the inherent political leanings of these models. Subsequently, persona prompting with the PCT is used to explore explicit stereotypes across various social dimensions. In a final step, implicit stereotypes are uncovered by evaluating models with multilingual versions of the PCT. Key findings reveal a consistent left-leaning political alignment across all investigated models. Furthermore, while the nature and extent of stereotypes vary considerably between models, implicit stereotypes elicited through language variation are more pronounced than those identified via explicit persona prompting. Interestingly, for most models, implicit and explicit stereotypes show a notable alignment, suggesting a degree of transparency or "awareness" regarding their inherent biases. This study underscores the complex interplay of political bias and stereotypes in LLMs.

Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber

Recent works in Natural Language Inference (NLI) and related tasks, such as automated fact-checking, employ atomic fact decomposition to enhance interpretability and robustness. For this, existing methods rely on resource-intensive generative large language models (LLMs) to perform decomposition. We propose JEDI, an encoder-only architecture that jointly performs extractive atomic fact decomposition and interpretable inference without requiring generative models during inference. To facilitate training, we produce a large corpus of synthetic rationales covering multiple NLI benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that JEDI achieves competitive accuracy in distribution and significantly improves robustness out of distribution and in adversarial settings over models based solely on extractive rationale supervision. Our findings show that interpretability and robust generalization in NLI can be realized using encoder-only architectures and synthetic rationales. Code and data available at https://jedi.nicpopovic.com

Julius Neumann, Robert Lange, Yuni Susanti et al.

Sentiment classification in short text datasets faces significant challenges such as class imbalance, limited training samples, and the inherent subjectivity of sentiment labels -- issues that are further intensified by the limited context in short texts. These factors make it difficult to resolve ambiguity and exacerbate data sparsity, hindering effective learning. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of small Transformer-based models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa, with fewer than 1 billion parameters) for multi-label sentiment classification, with a particular focus on short-text settings. Specifically, we evaluated three key factors influencing model performance: (1) continued domain-specific pre-training, (2) data augmentation using automatically generated examples, specifically generative data augmentation, and (3) architectural variations of the classification head. Our experiment results show that data augmentation improves classification performance, while continued pre-training on augmented datasets can introduce noise rather than boost accuracy. Furthermore, we confirm that modifications to the classification head yield only marginal benefits. These findings provide practical guidance for optimizing BERT-based models in resource-constrained settings and refining strategies for sentiment classification in short-text datasets.

Shuzhou Yuan, Zhan Qu, Mario Tawfelis et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong linguistic capabilities, but little is known about how they encode psycholinguistic knowledge across languages. We investigate whether and how LLMs exhibit human-like psycholinguistic responses under different linguistic identities using two tasks: sound symbolism and word valence. We evaluate two models, Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, under monolingual and bilingual prompting in English, Dutch, and Chinese. Behaviorally, both models adjust their outputs based on prompted language identity, with Qwen showing greater sensitivity and sharper distinctions between Dutch and Chinese. Probing analysis reveals that psycholinguistic signals become more decodable in deeper layers, with Chinese prompts yielding stronger and more stable valence representations than Dutch. Our results demonstrate that language identity conditions both output behavior and internal representations in LLMs, providing new insights into their application as models of cross-linguistic cognition.

Nicholas Popovič, Ashish Kangen, Tim Schopf et al.

Large, high-quality annotated corpora remain scarce in document-level entity and relation extraction in zero-shot or few-shot settings. In this paper, we present a fully automatic, LLM-based pipeline for synthetic data generation and in-context learning for document-level entity and relation extraction. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on manually annotated demonstrations or direct zero-shot inference, our method combines synthetic data generation with retrieval-based in-context learning, using a reasoning-optimized language model. This allows us to build a high-quality demonstration database without manual annotation and to dynamically retrieve relevant examples at inference time. Based on our approach we produce a synthetic dataset of over $5k$ Wikipedia abstracts with approximately $59k$ entities and $30k$ relation triples. Finally, we evaluate in-context learning performance on the DocIE shared task, extracting entities and relations from long documents in a zero-shot setting. We find that in-context joint entity and relation extraction at document-level remains a challenging task, even for state-of-the-art large language models.

Zhan Qu, Shuzhou Yuan, Michael Färber et al.

Wake vortices - strong, coherent air turbulences created by aircraft - pose a significant risk to aviation safety and therefore require accurate and reliable detection methods. In this paper, we present an advanced, explainable machine learning method that utilizes Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for effective wake vortex detection. Our method leverages a dynamic graph CNN (DGCNN) with semantic segmentation to partition a 3D LiDAR point cloud into meaningful segments. Further refinement is achieved through clustering techniques. A novel feature of our research is the use of a perturbation-based explanation technique, which clarifies the model's decision-making processes for air traffic regulators and controllers, increasing transparency and building trust. Our experimental results, based on measured and simulated LiDAR scans compared against four baseline methods, underscore the effectiveness and reliability of our approach. This combination of semantic segmentation and clustering for real-time wake vortex tracking significantly advances aviation safety measures, ensuring that these are both effective and comprehensible.

Andrei Politov, Oleh Shkalikov, René Jäkel et al.

Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) leverages knowledge transfer between languages to identify and classify named entities, making it particularly useful for low-resource languages. We show that the data-based cross-lingual transfer method is an effective technique for crosslingual NER and can outperform multilingual language models for low-resource languages. This paper introduces two key enhancements to the annotation projection step in cross-lingual NER for low-resource languages. First, we explore refining word alignments using back-translation to improve accuracy. Second, we present a novel formalized projection approach of matching source entities with extracted target candidates. Through extensive experiments on two datasets spanning 57 languages, we demonstrated that our approach surpasses existing projectionbased methods in low-resource settings. These findings highlight the robustness of projection-based data transfer as an alternative to model-based methods for crosslingual named entity recognition in lowresource languages.

Ercong Nie, Shuzhou Yuan, Bolei Ma et al.

Probing the multilingual knowledge of linguistic structure in LLMs, often characterized as sequence labeling, faces challenges with maintaining output templates in current text-to-text prompting strategies. To solve this, we introduce a decomposed prompting approach for sequence labeling tasks. Diverging from the single text-to-text prompt, our prompt method generates for each token of the input sentence an individual prompt which asks for its linguistic label. We test our method on the Universal Dependencies part-of-speech tagging dataset for 38 languages, using both English-centric and multilingual LLMs. Our findings show that decomposed prompting surpasses the iterative prompting baseline in efficacy and efficiency under zero- and few-shot settings. Moreover, our analysis of multilingual performance of English-centric LLMs yields insights into the transferability of linguistic knowledge via multilingual prompting.

Michael Färber, Alexander Klein

One of the main challenges of startups is to raise capital from investors. For startup founders, it is therefore crucial to know whether investors have a bias against women as startup founders and in which way startups face disadvantages due to gender bias. Existing works on gender studies have mainly analyzed the US market. In this paper, we aim to give a more comprehensive picture of gender bias in early-stage startup funding. We examine European startups listed on Crunchbase using Semantic Web technologies and analyze how the share of female founders in a founding team affects the funding amount. We find that the relative amount of female founders has a negative impact on the funding raised. Furthermore, we observe that founder characteristics have an effect on the funding raised based on the founders' gender. Moreover, we find that gender bias in early-stage funding is less prevalent for serial founders with entrepreneurial experience as female founders benefit three times more than male founders from already having founded a startup. Overall, our study suggests that gender bias exists and is worth to be considered in the context of startup funding.

Michael Färber, Anna Steyer

Argument search aims at identifying arguments in natural language texts. In the past, this task has been addressed by a combination of keyword search and argument identification on the sentence- or document-level. However, existing frameworks often address only specific components of argument search and do not address the following aspects: (1) argument-query matching: identifying arguments that frame the topic slightly differently than the actual search query; (2) argument identification: identifying arguments that consist of multiple sentences; (3) argument clustering: selecting retrieved arguments by topical aspects. In this paper, we propose a framework for addressing these shortcomings. We suggest (1) to combine the keyword search with precomputed topic clusters for argument-query matching, (2) to apply a novel approach based on sentence-level sequence-labeling for argument identification, and (3) to present aggregated arguments to users based on topic-aware argument clustering. Our experiments on several real-world debate data sets demonstrate that density-based clustering algorithms, such as HDBSCAN, are particularly suitable for argument-query matching. With our sentence-level, BiLSTM-based sequence-labeling approach we achieve a macro F1 score of 0.71. Finally, evaluating our argument clustering method indicates that a fine-grained clustering of arguments by subtopics remains challenging but is worthwhile to be explored.

Tarek Saier, Michael Färber, Tornike Tsereteli

Citation information in scholarly data is an important source of insight into the reception of publications and the scholarly discourse. Outcomes of citation analyses and the applicability of citation based machine learning approaches heavily depend on the completeness of such data. One particular shortcoming of scholarly data nowadays is that non-English publications are often not included in data sets, or that language metadata is not available. Because of this, citations between publications of differing languages (cross-lingual citations) have only been studied to a very limited degree. In this paper, we present an analysis of cross-lingual citations based on over one million English papers, spanning three scientific disciplines and a time span of three decades. Our investigation covers differences between cited languages and disciplines, trends over time, and the usage characteristics as well as impact of cross-lingual citations. Among our findings are an increasing rate of citations to publications written in Chinese, citations being primarily to local non-English languages, and consistency in citation intent between cross- and monolingual citations. To facilitate further research, we make our collected data and source code publicly available.

Anna Nguyen, Daniel Hagenmayer, Tobias Weller et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved astonishing performance on various image classification tasks, but it is difficult for humans to understand how a classification comes about. Recent literature proposes methods to explain the classification process to humans. These focus mostly on visualizing feature maps and filter weights, which are not very intuitive for non-experts in analyzing a CNN classification. In this paper, we propose FilTag, an approach to effectively explain CNNs even to non-experts. The idea is that when images of a class frequently activate a convolutional filter, then that filter is tagged with that class. These tags provide an explanation to a reference of a class-specific feature detected by the filter. Based on the tagging, individual image classifications can then be intuitively explained in terms of the tags of the filters that the input image activates. Finally, we show that the tags are helpful in analyzing classification errors caused by noisy input images and that the tags can be further processed by machines.

Anna Nguyen, Adrian Oberföll, Michael Färber

The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)in classifying image data has been thoroughly demonstrated. In order to explain the classification to humans, methods for visualizing classification evidence have been developed in recent years. These explanations reveal that sometimes images are classified correctly, but for the wrong reasons,i.e., based on incidental evidence. Of course, it is desirable that images are classified correctly for the right reasons, i.e., based on the actual evidence. To this end, we propose a new explanation quality metric to measure object aligned explanation in image classification which we refer to as theObAlExmetric. Using object detection approaches, explanation approaches, and ObAlEx, we quantify the focus of CNNs on the actual evidence. Moreover, we show that additional training of the CNNs can improve the focus of CNNs without decreasing their accuracy.

Michael Färber, Ashwath Sampath

Citation recommendation systems aim to recommend citations for either a complete paper or a small portion of text called a citation context. The process of recommending citations for citation contexts is called local citation recommendation and is the focus of this paper. Firstly, we develop citation recommendation approaches based on embeddings, topic modeling, and information retrieval techniques. We combine, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the best-performing algorithms into a semi-genetic hybrid recommender system for citation recommendation. We evaluate the single approaches and the hybrid approach offline based on several data sets, such as the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and the MAG in combination with arXiv and ACL. We further conduct a user study for evaluating our approaches online. Our evaluation results show that a hybrid model containing embedding and information retrieval-based components outperforms its individual components and further algorithms by a large margin.

Anna Nguyen, Tobias Weller, Michael Färber et al.

Research on neural networks has gained significant momentum over the past few years. Because training is a resource-intensive process and training data cannot always be made available to everyone, there has been a trend to reuse pre-trained neural networks. As such, neural networks themselves have become research data. In this paper, we first present the neural network ontology FAIRnets Ontology, an ontology to make existing neural network models findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable according to the FAIR principles. Our ontology allows us to model neural networks on a meta-level in a structured way, including the representation of all network layers and their characteristics. Secondly, we have modeled over 18,400 neural networks from GitHub based on this ontology, which we provide to the public as a knowledge graph called FAIRnets, ready to be used for recommending suitable neural networks to data scientists.

Michael Färber

Crunchbase is an online platform collecting information about startups and technology companies, including attributes and relations of companies, people, and investments. Data contained in Crunchbase is, to a large extent, not available elsewhere, making Crunchbase to a unique data source. In this paper, we present how to bring Crunchbase to the Web of Data so that its data can be used in the machine-readable RDF format by anyone on the Web. First, we give insights into how we developed and hosted a Linked Data API for Crunchbase and how sameAs links to other data sources are integrated. Then, we present our method for crawling RDF data based on this API to build a custom Crunchbase RDF knowledge graph. We created an RDF data set with over 347 million triples, including 781k people, 659k organizations, and 343k investments. Our Crunchbase Linked Data API is available online at http://linked-crunchbase.org.

Michael Färber, Achim Rettinger

In recent years, DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO have been published as noteworthy large, cross-domain, and freely available knowledge graphs. Although extensively in use, these knowledge graphs are hard to compare against each other in a given setting. Thus, it is a challenge for researchers and developers to pick the best knowledge graph for their individual needs. In our recent survey, we devised and applied data quality criteria to the above-mentioned knowledge graphs. Furthermore, we proposed a framework for finding the most suitable knowledge graph for a given setting. With this paper we intend to ease the access to our in-depth survey by presenting simplified rules that map individual data quality requirements to specific knowledge graphs. However, this paper does not intend to replace our previously introduced decision-support framework. For an informed decision on which KG is best for you we still refer to our in-depth survey.