Rafael Macalaba

Rafael Macalaba, Aivin V. Solatorio

While platforms like Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar track citations for academic papers, no comparable infrastructure exists for monitoring dataset usage in research literature, leaving the landscape of data use largely opaque. Addressing this gap is critical for transparency, reproducibility, and monitoring of impact, yet progress is hindered by inconsistent citation practices, scarce labeled data, and ambiguous references to datasets in the wild. Traditional NLP approaches struggle with these challenges, motivating the shift toward more adaptive, semantically rich models. Building on prior work using LLMs for data mention detection and synthetic data for bootstrapping training, this paper presents an updated methodology for scalable dataset monitoring. We introduce a multitask GLiNER-based framework that jointly performs dataset mention extraction, relation identification, and usage-context classification. To address label scarcity, the pipeline leverages synthetic data generation to produce training examples and LLM-based revalidation to filter incorrect mentions and enforce labeling consistency, together improving reliability, coverage, and output consistency across the training pipeline. This work advances the development of open-source tools for monitoring data use in research literature, contributing to the broader goal of generalizable, unconstrained dataset citation tracking.

Aivin V. Solatorio, Rafael Macalaba, James Liounis

Tracking how data is mentioned and used in research papers provides critical insights for improving data discoverability, quality, and production. However, manually identifying and classifying dataset mentions across vast academic literature is resource-intensive and not scalable. This paper presents a machine learning framework that automates dataset mention detection across research domains by leveraging large language models (LLMs), synthetic data, and a two-stage fine-tuning process. We employ zero-shot extraction from research papers, an LLM-as-a-Judge for quality assessment, and a reasoning agent for refinement to generate a weakly supervised synthetic dataset. The Phi-3.5-mini instruct model is pre-fine-tuned on this dataset, followed by fine-tuning on a manually annotated subset. At inference, a ModernBERT-based classifier efficiently filters dataset mentions, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high recall. Evaluated on a held-out manually annotated sample, our fine-tuned model outperforms NuExtract-v1.5 and GLiNER-large-v2.1 in dataset extraction accuracy. Our results highlight how LLM-generated synthetic data can effectively address training data scarcity, improving generalization in low-resource settings. This framework offers a pathway toward scalable monitoring of dataset usage, enhancing transparency, and supporting researchers, funders, and policymakers in identifying data gaps and strengthening data accessibility for informed decision-making.