Sören Auer

CL
h-index23
66papers
2,081citations
Novelty35%
AI Score54

66 Papers

AIJul 31, 2023
LLMs4OL: Large Language Models for Ontology Learning

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

We propose the LLMs4OL approach, which utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for Ontology Learning (OL). LLMs have shown significant advancements in natural language processing, demonstrating their ability to capture complex language patterns in different knowledge domains. Our LLMs4OL paradigm investigates the following hypothesis: \textit{Can LLMs effectively apply their language pattern capturing capability to OL, which involves automatically extracting and structuring knowledge from natural language text?} To test this hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation using the zero-shot prompting method. We evaluate nine different LLM model families for three main OL tasks: term typing, taxonomy discovery, and extraction of non-taxonomic relations. Additionally, the evaluations encompass diverse genres of ontological knowledge, including lexicosemantic knowledge in WordNet, geographical knowledge in GeoNames, and medical knowledge in UMLS.

DLJun 1
Speaker Mining -- FAIR Data on Public Broadcasts for Question Answering

Tim Wittenborg, Omar Imad Remmo, Claudia Frick et al.

Public broadcasts are at the center of civic discourse: Traditional television talk shows, alongside emerging podcast and web video formats, capture and guide the attention of our societies, shaping how citizens encounter politics, science, and societal issues. Yet, systematic or even simple analyses of these formats face similar challenges: guest and content metadata are scarce, fleeting, fragmented, and not standardized. Research conducted and questions answered are based on extensive, laborious, yet isolated data-curation efforts that capture only a fraction of the relevant landscape. This work seeks to address this issue using a scaling-oriented framework for FAIR data curation in public broadcasting. Evaluated on 15 broadcasting programs, the pipeline aggregates ZDF Archive PDFs, fernsehserien.de, and Wikidata into a unified knowledge graph. Of the 31,817 candidate guest mentions from these three sources, 17,729 could be automatically disambiguated, further 5,958 via 64 hours of manual reconciling using OpenRefine. Results are published at speakermining.wikibase.cloud and linked to Wikidata, enabling SPARQL-based question answering based on gender, age, occupation, or institutional affiliation across 8,436 canonical persons with 23,527 appearances in 6,469 aligned episodes. Our iterative experience reveals that correctly disambiguating and deduplicating speaker data from heterogeneous sources demands dedicated effort on sustainable infrastructure. For scalable and reliable question answering on public broadcasts to be accessible to everyone, we recommend fostering the potential of linked open data: Advancing alignment and utilization approaches like this work, particularly towards crowdsourced development and curation, but also more FAIR data interfaces from public broadcast service providers.

CLMar 28, 2022
Computer Science Named Entity Recognition in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

Domain-specific named entity recognition (NER) on Computer Science (CS) scholarly articles is an information extraction task that is arguably more challenging for the various annotation aims that can beset the task and has been less studied than NER in the general domain. Given that significant progress has been made on NER, we believe that scholarly domain-specific NER will receive increasing attention in the years to come. Currently, progress on CS NER -- the focus of this work -- is hampered in part by its recency and the lack of a standardized annotation aim for scientific entities/terms. This work proposes a standardized task by defining a set of seven contribution-centric scholarly entities for CS NER viz., research problem, solution, resource, language, tool, method, and dataset. Following which, its main contributions are: combines existing CS NER resources that maintain their annotation focus on the set or subset of contribution-centric scholarly entities we consider; further, noting the need for big data to train neural NER models, this work additionally supplies thousands of contribution-centric entity annotations from article titles and abstracts, thus releasing a cumulative large novel resource for CS NER; and, finally, trains a sequence labeling CS NER model inspired after state-of-the-art neural architectures from the general domain NER task. Throughout the work, several practical considerations are made which can be useful to information technology designers of the digital libraries.

CLSep 27, 2024Code
LLMs4Synthesis: Leveraging Large Language Models for Scientific Synthesis

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

In response to the growing complexity and volume of scientific literature, this paper introduces the LLMs4Synthesis framework, designed to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating high-quality scientific syntheses. This framework addresses the need for rapid, coherent, and contextually rich integration of scientific insights, leveraging both open-source and proprietary LLMs. It also examines the effectiveness of LLMs in evaluating the integrity and reliability of these syntheses, alleviating inadequacies in current quantitative metrics. Our study contributes to this field by developing a novel methodology for processing scientific papers, defining new synthesis types, and establishing nine detailed quality criteria for evaluating syntheses. The integration of LLMs with reinforcement learning and AI feedback is proposed to optimize synthesis quality, ensuring alignment with established criteria. The LLMs4Synthesis framework and its components are made available, promising to enhance both the generation and evaluation processes in scientific research synthesis.

CLMar 29, 2023
Zero-shot Entailment of Leaderboards for Empirical AI Research

Salomon Kabongo, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

We present a large-scale empirical investigation of the zero-shot learning phenomena in a specific recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task category, i.e. the automated mining of leaderboards for Empirical AI Research. The prior reported state-of-the-art models for leaderboards extraction formulated as an RTE task, in a non-zero-shot setting, are promising with above 90% reported performances. However, a central research question remains unexamined: did the models actually learn entailment? Thus, for the experiments in this paper, two prior reported state-of-the-art models are tested out-of-the-box for their ability to generalize or their capacity for entailment, given leaderboard labels that were unseen during training. We hypothesize that if the models learned entailment, their zero-shot performances can be expected to be moderately high as well--perhaps, concretely, better than chance. As a result of this work, a zero-shot labeled dataset is created via distant labeling formulating the leaderboard extraction RTE task.

AIMar 27, 2023
Describing and Organizing Semantic Web and Machine Learning Systems in the SWeMLS-KG

Fajar J. Ekaputra, Majlinda Llugiqi, Marta Sabou et al.

In line with the general trend in artificial intelligence research to create intelligent systems that combine learning and symbolic components, a new sub-area has emerged that focuses on combining machine learning (ML) components with techniques developed by the Semantic Web (SW) community - Semantic Web Machine Learning (SWeML for short). Due to its rapid growth and impact on several communities in the last two decades, there is a need to better understand the space of these SWeML Systems, their characteristics, and trends. Yet, surveys that adopt principled and unbiased approaches are missing. To fill this gap, we performed a systematic study and analyzed nearly 500 papers published in the last decade in this area, where we focused on evaluating architectural, and application-specific features. Our analysis identified a rapidly growing interest in SWeML Systems, with a high impact on several application domains and tasks. Catalysts for this rapid growth are the increased application of deep learning and knowledge graph technologies. By leveraging the in-depth understanding of this area acquired through this study, a further key contribution of this paper is a classification system for SWeML Systems which we publish as ontology.

CLJul 3, 2024Code
Large Language Models as Evaluators for Scientific Synthesis

Julia Evans, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

Our study explores how well the state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and Mistral, can assess the quality of scientific summaries or, more fittingly, scientific syntheses, comparing their evaluations to those of human annotators. We used a dataset of 100 research questions and their syntheses made by GPT-4 from abstracts of five related papers, checked against human quality ratings. The study evaluates both the closed-source GPT-4 and the open-source Mistral model's ability to rate these summaries and provide reasons for their judgments. Preliminary results show that LLMs can offer logical explanations that somewhat match the quality ratings, yet a deeper statistical analysis shows a weak correlation between LLM and human ratings, suggesting the potential and current limitations of LLMs in scientific synthesis evaluation.

CLJun 3, 2022
Plumber: A Modular Framework to Create Information Extraction Pipelines

Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Kuldeep Singh, Markus Stocker et al.

Information Extraction (IE) tasks are commonly studied topics in various domains of research. Hence, the community continuously produces multiple techniques, solutions, and tools to perform such tasks. However, running those tools and integrating them within existing infrastructure requires time, expertise, and resources. One pertinent task here is triples extraction and linking, where structured triples are extracted from a text and aligned to an existing Knowledge Graph (KG). In this paper, we present PLUMBER, the first framework that allows users to manually and automatically create suitable IE pipelines from a community-created pool of tools to perform triple extraction and alignment on unstructured text. Our approach provides an interactive medium to alter the pipelines and perform IE tasks. A short video to show the working of the framework for different use-cases is available online under: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC9rJNIUv8g

CLDec 11, 2022
MORTY: Structured Summarization for Targeted Information Extraction from Scholarly Articles

Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Markus Stocker, Sören Auer

Information extraction from scholarly articles is a challenging task due to the sizable document length and implicit information hidden in text, figures, and citations. Scholarly information extraction has various applications in exploration, archival, and curation services for digital libraries and knowledge management systems. We present MORTY, an information extraction technique that creates structured summaries of text from scholarly articles. Our approach condenses the article's full-text to property-value pairs as a segmented text snippet called structured summary. We also present a sizable scholarly dataset combining structured summaries retrieved from a scholarly knowledge graph and corresponding publicly available scientific articles, which we openly publish as a resource for the research community. Our results show that structured summarization is a suitable approach for targeted information extraction that complements other commonly used methods such as question answering and named entity recognition.

DLOct 5, 2022
Clustering Semantic Predicates in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Omar Arab Oghli, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

When semantically describing knowledge graphs (KGs), users have to make a critical choice of a vocabulary (i.e. predicates and resources). The success of KG building is determined by the convergence of shared vocabularies so that meaning can be established. The typical lifecycle for a new KG construction can be defined as follows: nascent phases of graph construction experience terminology divergence, while later phases of graph construction experience terminology convergence and reuse. In this paper, we describe our approach tailoring two AI-based clustering algorithms for recommending predicates (in RDF statements) about resources in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) https://orkg.org/. Such a service to recommend existing predicates to semantify new incoming data of scholarly publications is of paramount importance for fostering terminology convergence in the ORKG. Our experiments show very promising results: a high precision with relatively high recall in linear runtime performance. Furthermore, this work offers novel insights into the predicate groups that automatically accrue loosely as generic semantification patterns for semantification of scholarly knowledge spanning 44 research fields.

DLMar 28, 2022
The Digitalization of Bioassays in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Jennifer D'Souza, Anita Monteverdi, Muhammad Haris et al.

Background: Recent years are seeing a growing impetus in the semantification of scholarly knowledge at the fine-grained level of scientific entities in knowledge graphs. The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) https://www.orkg.org/ represents an important step in this direction, with thousands of scholarly contributions as structured, fine-grained, machine-readable data. There is a need, however, to engender change in traditional community practices of recording contributions as unstructured, non-machine-readable text. For this in turn, there is a strong need for AI tools designed for scientists that permit easy and accurate semantification of their scholarly contributions. We present one such tool, ORKG-assays. Implementation: ORKG-assays is a freely available AI micro-service in ORKG written in Python designed to assist scientists obtain semantified bioassays as a set of triples. It uses an AI-based clustering algorithm which on gold-standard evaluations over 900 bioassays with 5,514 unique property-value pairs for 103 predicates shows competitive performance. Results and Discussion: As a result, semantified assay collections can be surveyed on the ORKG platform via tabulation or chart-based visualizations of key property values of the chemicals and compounds offering smart knowledge access to biochemists and pharmaceutical researchers in the advancement of drug development.

CLSep 16, 2024
LLMs4OL 2024 Overview: The 1st Large Language Models for Ontology Learning Challenge

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

This paper outlines the LLMs4OL 2024, the first edition of the Large Language Models for Ontology Learning Challenge. LLMs4OL is a community development initiative collocated with the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) to explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Ontology Learning (OL), a vital process for enhancing the web with structured knowledge to improve interoperability. By leveraging LLMs, the challenge aims to advance understanding and innovation in OL, aligning with the goals of the Semantic Web to create a more intelligent and user-friendly web. In this paper, we give an overview of the 2024 edition of the LLMs4OL challenge and summarize the contributions.

DLSep 10, 2024
Fine-tuning and Prompt Engineering with Cognitive Knowledge Graphs for Scholarly Knowledge Organization

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.

AIDec 18, 2025
Towards AI-Supported Research: a Vision of the TIB AIssistant

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.

IRDec 18, 2025
Introducing ORKG ASK: an AI-driven Scholarly Literature Search and Exploration System Taking a Neuro-Symbolic 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.

AIDec 18, 2025
TIB AIssistant: a Platform for AI-Supported Research Across Research Life Cycles

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.

AIMar 27, 2025Code
OntoAligner: A Comprehensive Modular and Robust Python Toolkit for Ontology Alignment

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Oliver Karras et al.

Ontology Alignment (OA) is fundamental for achieving semantic interoperability across diverse knowledge systems. We present OntoAligner, a comprehensive, modular, and robust Python toolkit for ontology alignment, designed to address current limitations with existing tools faced by practitioners. Existing tools are limited in scalability, modularity, and ease of integration with recent AI advances. OntoAligner provides a flexible architecture integrating existing lightweight OA techniques such as fuzzy matching but goes beyond by supporting contemporary methods with retrieval-augmented generation and large language models for OA. The framework prioritizes extensibility, enabling researchers to integrate custom alignment algorithms and datasets. This paper details the design principles, architecture, and implementation of the OntoAligner, demonstrating its utility through benchmarks on standard OA tasks. Our evaluation highlights OntoAligner's ability to handle large-scale ontologies efficiently with few lines of code while delivering high alignment quality. By making OntoAligner open-source, we aim to provide a resource that fosters innovation and collaboration within the OA community, empowering researchers and practitioners with a toolkit for reproducible OA research and real-world applications.

LGMay 15
MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility

Sasi Kiran Gaddipati, Diyana Muhammed, Farhana Keya et al.

Autonomous research systems capable of generating complete scientific manuscripts have advanced rapidly, yet robust and realistic evaluation frameworks have failed to keep pace. To bridge this gap, we introduce MLReplicate, an end-to-end benchmark evaluating autonomous research systems on machine learning reproducibility. The benchmark was constructed from ICML 2025 outstanding papers reformulated into standardized input specifications and evaluated across 6 state-of-the-art research systems: AI SCIENTIST-V1, AI SCIENTIST-V2, AGENT LABORATORY, CYCLERESEARCHER, AI RESEARCHER, and TINY SCIENTIST, yielding 45 generated manuscripts, with 3 failed experiments. Outputs are assessed using a dual-protocol approach that combines automated conference-style review and structured expert human evaluation, while tracking computational cost, runtime, and the amount of required human intervention. The automated conference-style review accepted 10 out of 37 valid submissions. An additional 8 submissions were desk-rejected before review for failing to meet the minimum page threshold. In contrast to automated reviews, human reviewers consistently identified methodological flaws, hallucinated experimental results, and reproducibility failures across all systems, and 59% of accepted automated reviews contained fabricated or unsupported claims. We further find that neither token budget nor computational cost predicts output quality: the cheapest system outperforms the most resource-intensive system in human evaluation, despite a 38-fold difference in input tokens. We thus demonstrate that autonomous research workflow design matters more than the scale of compute. MLReplicate exposes a substantial gap between current autonomous research systems and genuine scientific rigor, and establishes a practical, extensible evaluation framework for systematic progress toward trustworthy AI-driven scientific discovery.

AISep 14, 2025Code
AIssistant: An Agentic Approach for Human--AI Collaborative Scientific Work on Reviews and Perspectives in Machine Learning

Sasi Kiran Gaddipati, Farhana Keya, Gollam Rabby et al.

Advances in AI-assisted research have introduced powerful tools for literature retrieval, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript preparation. However, systems remain fragmented and lack human-centred workflows. To address these gaps, we introduce AIssistant, an agentic, open-source Human-AI collaborative framework designed to simplify the end-to-end creation of scientific workflows. Since our development is still in an early stage, we present here the first experiments with AIssistant for perspective and review research papers in machine learning. Our system integrates modular tools and agents for literature synthesis, section-wise experimentation, citation management, and automatic LaTeX paper text generation, while maintaining human oversight at every stage to ensure accuracy, coherence, and scholarly rigour. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation across three layers: (1) Independent Human Review, following NeurIPS double-blind standards; (2) Automated LLM Review, using GPT-5 as a scalable human review proxy; and (3) Program Chair Oversight, where the chair monitors the entire review process and makes final validation and acceptance decisions. The results demonstrate that AIssistant improves drafting efficiency and thematic consistency. Nonetheless, Human-AI collaboration remains essential for maintaining factual correctness, methodological soundness, and ethical compliance. Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content.

DLMay 12, 2025Code
SciCom Wiki: Fact-Checking and FAIR Knowledge Distribution for Scientific Videos and Podcasts

Tim Wittenborg, Constantin Sebastian Tremel, Niklas Stehr et al.

Democratic societies need accessible, reliable information. Videos and Podcasts have established themselves as the medium of choice for civic dissemination, but also as carriers of misinformation. The emerging Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure (SciCom KI) curating non-textual media is still fragmented and not adequately equipped to scale against the content flood. Our work sets out to support the SciCom KI with a central, collaborative platform, the SciCom Wiki, to facilitate FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) media representation and the fact-checking of their content, particularly for videos and podcasts. Building an open-source service system centered around Wikibase, we survey requirements from 53 stakeholders, refine these in 11 interviews, and evaluate our prototype based on these requirements with another 14 participants. To address the most requested feature, fact-checking, we developed a neurosymbolic computational fact-checking approach, converting heterogenous media into knowledge graphs. This increases machine-readability and allows comparing statements against equally represented ground-truth. Our computational fact-checking tool was iteratively evaluated through 10 expert interviews, a public user survey with 43 participants verified the necessity and usability of our tool. Overall, our findings identified several needs to systematically support the SciCom KI. The SciCom Wiki, as a FAIR digital library complementing our neurosymbolic computational fact-checking framework, was found suitable to address the raised requirements. Further, we identified that the SciCom KI is severely underdeveloped regarding FAIR knowledge and related systems facilitating its collaborative creation and curation. Our system can provide a central knowledge node, yet a collaborative effort is required to scale against the imminent (mis-)information flood.

LGFeb 26, 2025Code
Project Alexandria: Towards Freeing Scientific Knowledge from Copyright Burdens via LLMs

Christoph Schuhmann, Gollam Rabby, Ameya Prabhu et al.

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We propose a new idea for the community to adopt: convert scholarly documents into knowledge preserving, but style agnostic representations we term Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95\%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

MTRL-SCIMay 4
From Knowledge to Action: Outcomes of the 2025 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Aritra Roy, Kevin Shen, Andrew MacBride et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.

AIApr 16, 2024
LLMs4OM: Matching Ontologies with Large Language Models

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Felix Engel et al.

Ontology Matching (OM), is a critical task in knowledge integration, where aligning heterogeneous ontologies facilitates data interoperability and knowledge sharing. Traditional OM systems often rely on expert knowledge or predictive models, with limited exploration of the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). We present the LLMs4OM framework, a novel approach to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in OM tasks. This framework utilizes two modules for retrieval and matching, respectively, enhanced by zero-shot prompting across three ontology representations: concept, concept-parent, and concept-children. Through comprehensive evaluations using 20 OM datasets from various domains, we demonstrate that LLMs, under the LLMs4OM framework, can match and even surpass the performance of traditional OM systems, particularly in complex matching scenarios. Our results highlight the potential of LLMs to significantly contribute to the field of OM.

LGNov 23, 2024
MC-NEST: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models leveraging a Monte Carlo Self-Refine Tree

Gollam Rabby, Farhana Keya, Sören Auer

Mathematical reasoning presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). To enhance their capabilities, we propose Monte Carlo Self-Refine Tree (MC-NEST), an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search that integrates LLM-based self-refinement and self-evaluation for improved decision-making in complex reasoning tasks. MC-NEST balances exploration and exploitation using Upper Confidence Bound (UCT) scores combined with diverse selection policies. Through iterative critique and refinement, LLMs learn to reason more strategically. Empirical results demonstrate that MC-NEST with an importance sampling policy substantially improves GPT-4o's performance, achieving state-of-the-art pass@1 scores on Olympiad-level benchmarks. Specifically, MC-NEST attains a pass@1 of 38.6 on AIME and 12.6 on MathOdyssey. The solution quality for MC-NEST using GPT-4o and Phi-3-mini reaches 84.0\% and 82.08\%, respectively, indicating robust consistency across different LLMs. MC-NEST performs strongly across Algebra, Geometry, and Number Theory, benefiting from its ability to handle abstraction, logical deduction, and multi-step reasoning -- core skills in mathematical problem solving.

CLMar 25, 2025
Iterative Hypothesis Generation for Scientific Discovery with Monte Carlo Nash Equilibrium Self-Refining Trees

Gollam Rabby, Diyana Muhammed, Prasenjit Mitra et al.

Scientific hypothesis generation is a fundamentally challenging task in research, requiring the synthesis of novel and empirically grounded insights. Traditional approaches rely on human intuition and domain expertise, while purely large language model (LLM) based methods often struggle to produce hypotheses that are both innovative and reliable. To address these limitations, we propose the Monte Carlo Nash Equilibrium Self-Refine Tree (MC-NEST), a novel framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search with Nash Equilibrium strategies to iteratively refine and validate hypotheses. MC-NEST dynamically balances exploration and exploitation through adaptive sampling strategies, which prioritize high-potential hypotheses while maintaining diversity in the search space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MC-NEST through comprehensive experiments across multiple domains, including biomedicine, social science, and computer science. MC-NEST achieves average scores of 2.65, 2.74, and 2.80 (on a 1-3 scale) for novelty, clarity, significance, and verifiability metrics on the social science, computer science, and biomedicine datasets, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art prompt-based methods, which achieve 2.36, 2.51, and 2.52 on the same datasets. These results underscore MC-NEST's ability to generate high-quality, empirically grounded hypotheses across diverse domains. Furthermore, MC-NEST facilitates structured human-AI collaboration, ensuring that LLMs augment human creativity rather than replace it. By addressing key challenges such as iterative refinement and the exploration-exploitation balance, MC-NEST sets a new benchmark in automated hypothesis generation. Additionally, MC-NEST's ethical design enables responsible AI use, emphasizing transparency and human supervision in hypothesis generation.

CLFeb 3, 2025
SelfCheckAgent: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in Generative Large Language Models

Diyana Muhammed, Gollam Rabby, Sören Auer

Detecting hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for their reliable deployment in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SelfCheckAgent, a novel framework integrating three different agents: the Symbolic Agent, the Specialized Detection Agent, and the Contextual Consistency Agent. These agents provide a robust multi-dimensional approach to hallucination detection. Notable results include the Contextual Consistency Agent leveraging Llama 3.1 with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to achieve outstanding performance on the WikiBio dataset, with NonFactual hallucination detection scoring 93.64%, Factual 70.26%, and Ranking 78.48% respectively. On the AIME dataset, GPT-4o with CoT excels in NonFactual detection with 94.89% but reveals trade-offs in Factual with 30.58% and Ranking with 30.68%, underscoring the complexity of hallucination detection in the complex mathematical domains. The framework also incorporates a triangulation strategy, which increases the strengths of the SelfCheckAgent, yielding significant improvements in real-world hallucination identification. The comparative analysis demonstrates SelfCheckAgent's applicability across diverse domains, positioning it as a crucial advancement for trustworthy LLMs. These findings highlight the potentiality of consistency-driven methodologies in detecting hallucinations in LLMs.

CLApr 1, 2025
LLMs4SchemaDiscovery: A Human-in-the-Loop Workflow for Scientific Schema Mining with Large Language Models

Sameer Sadruddin, Jennifer D'Souza, Eleni Poupaki et al.

Extracting structured information from unstructured text is crucial for modeling real-world processes, but traditional schema mining relies on semi-structured data, limiting scalability. This paper introduces schema-miner, a novel tool that combines large language models with human feedback to automate and refine schema extraction. Through an iterative workflow, it organizes properties from text, incorporates expert input, and integrates domain-specific ontologies for semantic depth. Applied to materials science--specifically atomic layer deposition--schema-miner demonstrates that expert-guided LLMs generate semantically rich schemas suitable for diverse real-world applications.

DLApr 14, 2025
SciMantify -- A Hybrid Approach for the Evolving Semantification of Scientific Knowledge

Lena John, Kheir Eddine Farfar, Sören Auer et al.

Scientific publications, primarily digitized as PDFs, remain static and unstructured, limiting the accessibility and reusability of the contained knowledge. At best, scientific knowledge from publications is provided in tabular formats, which lack semantic context. A more flexible, structured, and semantic representation is needed to make scientific knowledge understandable and processable by both humans and machines. We propose an evolution model of knowledge representation, inspired by the 5-star Linked Open Data (LOD) model, with five stages and defined criteria to guide the stepwise transition from a digital artifact, such as a PDF, to a semantic representation integrated in a knowledge graph (KG). Based on an exemplary workflow implementing the entire model, we developed a hybrid approach, called SciMantify, leveraging tabular formats of scientific knowledge, e.g., results from secondary studies, to support its evolving semantification. In the approach, humans and machines collaborate closely by performing semantic annotation tasks (SATs) and refining the results to progressively improve the semantic representation of scientific knowledge. We implemented the approach in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), an established platform for improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scientific knowledge. A preliminary user experiment showed that the approach simplifies the preprocessing of scientific knowledge, reduces the effort for the evolving semantification, and enhances the knowledge representation through better alignment with the KG structures.

CLMar 25, 2025
SCI-IDEA: Context-Aware Scientific Ideation Using Token and Sentence Embeddings

Farhana Keya, Gollam Rabby, Prasenjit Mitra et al.

Every scientific discovery starts with an idea inspired by prior work, interdisciplinary concepts, and emerging challenges. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) trained on scientific corpora have driven interest in AI-supported idea generation. However, generating context-aware, high-quality, and innovative ideas remains challenging. We introduce SCI-IDEA, a framework that uses LLM prompting strategies and Aha Moment detection for iterative idea refinement. SCI-IDEA extracts essential facets from research publications, assessing generated ideas on novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness. Comprehensive experiments validate SCI-IDEA's effectiveness, achieving average scores of 6.84, 6.86, 6.89, and 6.84 (on a 1-10 scale) across novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness, respectively. Evaluations employed GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, DeepSeek-32B (each under 2-shot prompting), and DeepSeek-70B (3-shot prompting), with token-level embeddings used for Aha Moment detection. Similarly, it achieves scores of 6.87, 6.86, 6.83, and 6.87 using GPT-4o under 5-shot prompting, GPT-4.5 under 3-shot prompting, DeepSeek-32B under zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, and DeepSeek-70B under 5-shot prompting with sentence-level embeddings. We also address ethical considerations such as intellectual credit, potential misuse, and balancing human creativity with AI-driven ideation. Our results highlight SCI-IDEA's potential to facilitate the structured and flexible exploration of context-aware scientific ideas, supporting innovation while maintaining ethical standards.

AISep 30, 2025
OntoAligner Meets Knowledge Graph Embedding Aligners

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer et al.

Ontology Alignment (OA) is essential for enabling semantic interoperability across heterogeneous knowledge systems. While recent advances have focused on large language models (LLMs) for capturing contextual semantics, this work revisits the underexplored potential of Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models, which offer scalable, structure-aware representations well-suited to ontology-based tasks. Despite their effectiveness in link prediction, KGE methods remain underutilized in OA, with most prior work focusing narrowly on a few models. To address this gap, we reformulate OA as a link prediction problem over merged ontologies represented as RDF-style triples and develop a modular framework, integrated into the OntoAligner library, that supports 17 diverse KGE models. The system learns embeddings from a combined ontology and aligns entities by computing cosine similarity between their representations. We evaluate our approach using standard metrics across seven benchmark datasets spanning five domains: Anatomy, Biodiversity, Circular Economy, Material Science and Engineering, and Biomedical Machine Learning. Two key findings emerge: first, KGE models like ConvE and TransF consistently produce high-precision alignments, outperforming traditional systems in structure-rich and multi-relational domains; second, while their recall is moderate, this conservatism makes KGEs well-suited for scenarios demanding high-confidence mappings. Unlike LLM-based methods that excel at contextual reasoning, KGEs directly preserve and exploit ontology structure, offering a complementary and computationally efficient strategy. These results highlight the promise of embedding-based OA and open pathways for further work on hybrid models and adaptive strategies.

DLAug 27, 2025
Charting the Future of Scholarly Knowledge with AI: A Community Perspective

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.

CLJun 11, 2025
EmoNet-Voice: A Fine-Grained, Expert-Verified Benchmark for Speech Emotion Detection

Christoph Schuhmann, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Gollam Rabby et al.

The advancement of text-to-speech and audio generation models necessitates robust benchmarks for evaluating the emotional understanding capabilities of AI systems. Current speech emotion recognition (SER) datasets often exhibit limitations in emotional granularity, privacy concerns, or reliance on acted portrayals. This paper introduces EmoNet-Voice, a new resource for speech emotion detection, which includes EmoNet-Voice Big, a large-scale pre-training dataset (featuring over 4,500 hours of speech across 11 voices, 40 emotions, and 4 languages), and EmoNet-Voice Bench, a novel benchmark dataset with human expert annotations. EmoNet-Voice is designed to evaluate SER models on a fine-grained spectrum of 40 emotion categories with different levels of intensities. Leveraging state-of-the-art voice generation, we curated synthetic audio snippets simulating actors portraying scenes designed to evoke specific emotions. Crucially, we conducted rigorous validation by psychology experts who assigned perceived intensity labels. This synthetic, privacy-preserving approach allows for the inclusion of sensitive emotional states often absent in existing datasets. Lastly, we introduce Empathic Insight Voice models that set a new standard in speech emotion recognition with high agreement with human experts. Our evaluations across the current model landscape exhibit valuable findings, such as high-arousal emotions like anger being much easier to detect than low-arousal states like concentration.

CLMay 12, 2025
Computational Fact-Checking of Online Discourse: Scoring scientific accuracy in climate change related news articles

Tim Wittenborg, Constantin Sebastian Tremel, Markus Stocker et al.

Democratic societies need reliable information. Misinformation in popular media such as news articles or videos threatens to impair civic discourse. Citizens are, unfortunately, not equipped to verify this content flood consumed daily at increasing rates. This work aims to semi-automatically quantify scientific accuracy of online media. By semantifying media of unknown veracity, their statements can be compared against equally processed trusted sources. We implemented a workflow using LLM-based statement extraction and knowledge graph analysis. Our neurosymbolic system was able to evidently streamline state-of-the-art veracity quantification. Evaluated via expert interviews and a user survey, the tool provides a beneficial veracity indication. This indicator, however, is unable to annotate public media at the required granularity and scale. Further work towards a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ground truth and complementary metrics are required to scientifically support civic discourse.

CLOct 29, 2024
NeuroSym-BioCAT: Leveraging Neuro-Symbolic Methods for Biomedical Scholarly Document Categorization and Question Answering

Parvez Zamil, Gollam Rabby, Md. Sadekur Rahman et al.

The growing volume of biomedical scholarly document abstracts presents an increasing challenge in efficiently retrieving accurate and relevant information. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates an optimized topic modelling framework, OVB-LDA, with the BI-POP CMA-ES optimization technique for enhanced scholarly document abstract categorization. Complementing this, we employ the distilled MiniLM model, fine-tuned on domain-specific data, for high-precision answer extraction. Our approach is evaluated across three configurations: scholarly document abstract retrieval, gold-standard scholarly documents abstract, and gold-standard snippets, consistently outperforming established methods such as RYGH and bio-answer finder. Notably, we demonstrate that extracting answers from scholarly documents abstracts alone can yield high accuracy, underscoring the sufficiency of abstracts for many biomedical queries. Despite its compact size, MiniLM exhibits competitive performance, challenging the prevailing notion that only large, resource-intensive models can handle such complex tasks. Our results, validated across various question types and evaluation batches, highlight the robustness and adaptability of our method in real-world biomedical applications. While our approach shows promise, we identify challenges in handling complex list-type questions and inconsistencies in evaluation metrics. Future work will focus on refining the topic model with more extensive domain-specific datasets, further optimizing MiniLM and utilizing large language models (LLM) to improve both precision and efficiency in biomedical question answering.

CLJun 11, 2024
Scholarly Question Answering using Large Language Models in the NFDI4DataScience Gateway

Hamed Babaei Giglou, Tilahun Abedissa Taffa, Rana Abdullah et al.

This paper introduces a scholarly Question Answering (QA) system on top of the NFDI4DataScience Gateway, employing a Retrieval Augmented Generation-based (RAG) approach. The NFDI4DS Gateway, as a foundational framework, offers a unified and intuitive interface for querying various scientific databases using federated search. The RAG-based scholarly QA, powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), facilitates dynamic interaction with search results, enhancing filtering capabilities and fostering a conversational engagement with the Gateway search. The effectiveness of both the Gateway and the scholarly QA system is demonstrated through experimental analysis.

CLJun 6, 2024
Effective Context Selection in LLM-based Leaderboard Generation: An Empirical Study

Salomon Kabongo, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

This paper explores the impact of context selection on the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating Artificial Intelligence (AI) research leaderboards, a task defined as the extraction of (Task, Dataset, Metric, Score) quadruples from scholarly articles. By framing this challenge as a text generation objective and employing instruction finetuning with the FLAN-T5 collection, we introduce a novel method that surpasses traditional Natural Language Inference (NLI) approaches in adapting to new developments without a predefined taxonomy. Through experimentation with three distinct context types of varying selectivity and length, our study demonstrates the importance of effective context selection in enhancing LLM accuracy and reducing hallucinations, providing a new pathway for the reliable and efficient generation of AI leaderboards. This contribution not only advances the state of the art in leaderboard generation but also sheds light on strategies to mitigate common challenges in LLM-based information extraction.

CLJun 6, 2024
Exploring the Latest LLMs for Leaderboard Extraction

Salomon Kabongo, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for automating complex tasks in AI research. This paper investigates the efficacy of different LLMs-Mistral 7B, Llama-2, GPT-4-Turbo and GPT-4.o in extracting leaderboard information from empirical AI research articles. We explore three types of contextual inputs to the models: DocTAET (Document Title, Abstract, Experimental Setup, and Tabular Information), DocREC (Results, Experiments, and Conclusions), and DocFULL (entire document). Our comprehensive study evaluates the performance of these models in generating (Task, Dataset, Metric, Score) quadruples from research papers. The findings reveal significant insights into the strengths and limitations of each model and context type, providing valuable guidance for future AI research automation efforts.

CLJan 18, 2024
Large Language Models for Scientific Information Extraction: An Empirical Study for Virology

Mahsa Shamsabadi, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

In this paper, we champion the use of structured and semantic content representation of discourse-based scholarly communication, inspired by tools like Wikipedia infoboxes or structured Amazon product descriptions. These representations provide users with a concise overview, aiding scientists in navigating the dense academic landscape. Our novel automated approach leverages the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce structured scholarly contribution summaries, offering both a practical solution and insights into LLMs' emergent abilities. For LLMs, the prime focus is on improving their general intelligence as conversational agents. We argue that these models can also be applied effectively in information extraction (IE), specifically in complex IE tasks within terse domains like Science. This paradigm shift replaces the traditional modular, pipelined machine learning approach with a simpler objective expressed through instructions. Our results show that finetuned FLAN-T5 with 1000x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art GPT-davinci is competitive for the task.

CLMay 22, 2023
Evaluating Prompt-based Question Answering for Object Prediction in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Jennifer D'Souza, Moussab Hrou, Sören Auer

There have been many recent investigations into prompt-based training of transformer language models for new text genres in low-resource settings. The prompt-based training approach has been found to be effective in generalizing pre-trained or fine-tuned models for transfer to resource-scarce settings. This work, for the first time, reports results on adopting prompt-based training of transformers for \textit{scholarly knowledge graph object prediction}. The work is unique in the following two main aspects. 1) It deviates from the other works proposing entity and relation extraction pipelines for predicting objects of a scholarly knowledge graph. 2) While other works have tested the method on text genera relatively close to the general knowledge domain, we test the method for a significantly different domain, i.e. scholarly knowledge, in turn testing the linguistic, probabilistic, and factual generalizability of these large-scale transformer models. We find that (i) per expectations, transformer models when tested out-of-the-box underperform on a new domain of data, (ii) prompt-based training of the models achieve performance boosts of up to 40\% in a relaxed evaluation setting, and (iii) testing the models on a starkly different domain even with a clever training objective in a low resource setting makes evident the domain knowledge capture gap offering an empirically-verified incentive for investing more attention and resources to the scholarly domain in the context of transformer models.

CLMay 10, 2023
ORKG-Leaderboards: A Systematic Workflow for Mining Leaderboards as a Knowledge Graph

Salomon Kabongo, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

The purpose of this work is to describe the Orkg-Leaderboard software designed to extract leaderboards defined as Task-Dataset-Metric tuples automatically from large collections of empirical research papers in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The software can support both the main workflows of scholarly publishing, viz. as LaTeX files or as PDF files. Furthermore, the system is integrated with the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) platform, which fosters the machine-actionable publishing of scholarly findings. Thus the system output, when integrated within the ORKG's supported Semantic Web infrastructure of representing machine-actionable 'resources' on the Web, enables: 1) broadly, the integration of empirical results of researchers across the world, thus enabling transparency in empirical research with the potential to also being complete contingent on the underlying data source(s) of publications; and 2) specifically, enables researchers to track the progress in AI with an overview of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) across the most common AI tasks and their corresponding datasets via dynamic ORKG frontend views leveraging tables and visualization charts over the machine-actionable data. Our best model achieves performances above 90% F1 on the \textit{leaderboard} extraction task, thus proving Orkg-Leaderboards a practically viable tool for real-world usage. Going forward, in a sense, Orkg-Leaderboards transforms the leaderboard extraction task to an automated digitalization task, which has been, for a long time in the community, a crowdsourced endeavor.

DLMay 3, 2023
Evaluating BERT-based Scientific Relation Classifiers for Scholarly Knowledge Graph Construction on Digital Library Collections

Ming Jiang, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer et al.

The rapid growth of research publications has placed great demands on digital libraries (DL) for advanced information management technologies. To cater to these demands, techniques relying on knowledge-graph structures are being advocated. In such graph-based pipelines, inferring semantic relations between related scientific concepts is a crucial step. Recently, BERT-based pre-trained models have been popularly explored for automatic relation classification. Despite significant progress, most of them were evaluated in different scenarios, which limits their comparability. Furthermore, existing methods are primarily evaluated on clean texts, which ignores the digitization context of early scholarly publications in terms of machine scanning and optical character recognition (OCR). In such cases, the texts may contain OCR noise, in turn creating uncertainty about existing classifiers' performances. To address these limitations, we started by creating OCR-noisy texts based on three clean corpora. Given these parallel corpora, we conducted a thorough empirical evaluation of eight Bert-based classification models by focusing on three factors: (1) Bert variants; (2) classification strategies; and, (3) OCR noise impacts. Experiments on clean data show that the domain-specific pre-trained Bert is the best variant to identify scientific relations. The strategy of predicting a single relation each time outperforms the one simultaneously identifying multiple relations in general. The optimal classifier's performance can decline by around 10% to 20% in F-score on the noisy corpora. Insights discussed in this study can help DL stakeholders select techniques for building optimal knowledge-graph-based systems.

AINov 30, 2021
Easy Semantification of Bioassays

Marco Anteghini, Jennifer D'Souza, Vitor A. P. Martins dos Santos et al.

Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval and federated queries. We propose a solution for automatically semantifying biological assays. Our solution contrasts the problem of automated semantification as labeling versus clustering where the two methods are on opposite ends of the method complexity spectrum. Characteristically modeling our problem, we find the clustering solution significantly outperforms a deep neural network state-of-the-art labeling approach. This novel contribution is based on two factors: 1) a learning objective closely modeled after the data outperforms an alternative approach with sophisticated semantic modeling; 2) automatically semantifying biological assays achieves a high performance F1 of nearly 83%, which to our knowledge is the first reported standardized evaluation of the task offering a strong benchmark model.

CLNov 23, 2021
Triple Classification for Scholarly Knowledge Graph Completion

Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Kuldeep Singh, Markus Stocker et al.

Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide a rich source of structured information representing knowledge encoded in scientific publications. With the sheer volume of published scientific literature comprising a plethora of inhomogeneous entities and relations to describe scientific concepts, these KGs are inherently incomplete. We present exBERT, a method for leveraging pre-trained transformer language models to perform scholarly knowledge graph completion. We model triples of a knowledge graph as text and perform triple classification (i.e., belongs to KG or not). The evaluation shows that exBERT outperforms other baselines on three scholarly KG completion datasets in the tasks of triple classification, link prediction, and relation prediction. Furthermore, we present two scholarly datasets as resources for the research community, collected from public KGs and online resources.

CLAug 31, 2021
Automated Mining of Leaderboards for Empirical AI Research

Salomon Kabongo, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

With the rapid growth of research publications, empowering scientists to keep oversight over the scientific progress is of paramount importance. In this regard, the Leaderboards facet of information organization provides an overview on the state-of-the-art by aggregating empirical results from various studies addressing the same research challenge. Crowdsourcing efforts like PapersWithCode among others are devoted to the construction of Leaderboards predominantly for various subdomains in Artificial Intelligence. Leaderboards provide machine-readable scholarly knowledge that has proven to be directly useful for scientists to keep track of research progress. The construction of Leaderboards could be greatly expedited with automated text mining. This study presents a comprehensive approach for generating Leaderboards for knowledge-graph-based scholarly information organization. Specifically, we investigate the problem of automated Leaderboard construction using state-of-the-art transformer models, viz. Bert, SciBert, and XLNet. Our analysis reveals an optimal approach that significantly outperforms existing baselines for the task with evaluation scores above 90% in F1. This, in turn, offers new state-of-the-art results for Leaderboard extraction. As a result, a vast share of empirical AI research can be organized in the next-generation digital libraries as knowledge graphs.

DLAug 11, 2021
Researcher or Crowd Member? Why not both! The Open Research Knowledge Graph for Applying and Communicating CrowdRE Research

Oliver Karras, Eduard C. Groen, Javed Ali Khan et al.

In recent decades, there has been a major shift towards improved digital access to scholarly works. However, even now that these works are available in digital form, they remain document-based, making it difficult to communicate the knowledge they contain. The next logical step is to extend these works with more flexible, fine-grained, semantic, and context-sensitive representations of scholarly knowledge. The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) is a platform that structures and interlinks scholarly knowledge, relying on crowdsourced contributions from researchers (as a crowd) to acquire, curate, publish, and process this knowledge. In this experience report, we consider the ORKG in the context of Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE) from two perspectives: (1) As CrowdRE researchers, we investigate how the ORKG practically applies CrowdRE techniques to involve scholars in its development to make it align better with their academic work. We determined that the ORKG readily provides social and financial incentives, feedback elicitation channels, and support for context and usage monitoring, but that there is improvement potential regarding automated user feedback analyses and a holistic CrowdRE approach. (2) As crowd members, we explore how the ORKG can be used to communicate scholarly knowledge about CrowdRE research. For this purpose, we curated qualitative and quantitative scholarly knowledge in the ORKG based on papers contained in two previously published systematic literature reviews (SLRs) on CrowdRE. This knowledge can be explored and compared interactively, and with more data than what the SLRs originally contained. Therefore, the ORKG improves access and communication of the scholarly knowledge about CrowdRE research. For both perspectives, we found the ORKG to be a useful multi-tool for CrowdRE research.

CLJun 10, 2021
SemEval-2021 Task 11: NLPContributionGraph -- Structuring Scholarly NLP Contributions for a Research Knowledge Graph

Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer, Ted Pedersen

There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. The SemEval-2021 Shared Task NLPContributionGraph (a.k.a. 'the NCG task') tasks participants to develop automated systems that structure contributions from NLP scholarly articles in the English language. Being the first-of-its-kind in the SemEval series, the task released structured data from NLP scholarly articles at three levels of information granularity, i.e. at sentence-level, phrase-level, and phrases organized as triples toward Knowledge Graph (KG) building. The sentence-level annotations comprised the few sentences about the article's contribution. The phrase-level annotations were scientific term and predicate phrases from the contribution sentences. Finally, the triples constituted the research overview KG. For the Shared Task, participating systems were then expected to automatically classify contribution sentences, extract scientific terms and relations from the sentences, and organize them as KG triples. Overall, the task drew a strong participation demographic of seven teams and 27 participants. The best end-to-end task system classified contribution sentences at 57.27% F1, phrases at 46.41% F1, and triples at 22.28% F1. While the absolute performance to generate triples remains low, in the conclusion of this article, the difficulty of producing such data and as a consequence of modeling it is highlighted.

CLFeb 22, 2021
Better Call the Plumber: Orchestrating Dynamic Information Extraction Pipelines

Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Kuldeep Singh, Markus Stocker et al.

In the last decade, a large number of Knowledge Graph (KG) information extraction approaches were proposed. Albeit effective, these efforts are disjoint, and their collective strengths and weaknesses in effective KG information extraction (IE) have not been studied in the literature. We propose Plumber, the first framework that brings together the research community's disjoint IE efforts. The Plumber architecture comprises 33 reusable components for various KG information extraction subtasks, such as coreference resolution, entity linking, and relation extraction. Using these components,Plumber dynamically generates suitable information extraction pipelines and offers overall 264 distinct pipelines.We study the optimization problem of choosing suitable pipelines based on input sentences. To do so, we train a transformer-based classification model that extracts contextual embeddings from the input and finds an appropriate pipeline. We study the efficacy of Plumber for extracting the KG triples using standard datasets over two KGs: DBpedia, and Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of Plumber in dynamically generating KG information extraction pipelines,outperforming all baselines agnostics of the underlying KG. Furthermore,we provide an analysis of collective failure cases, study the similarities and synergies among integrated components, and discuss their limitations.

DLFeb 11, 2021
Analysing the Requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph: Use Cases, Quality Requirements and Construction Strategies

Arthur Brack, Anett Hoppe, Markus Stocker et al.

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions.

CLOct 9, 2020
Sentence, Phrase, and Triple Annotations to Build a Knowledge Graph of Natural Language Processing Contributions -- A Trial Dataset

Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer

Purpose: The aim of this work is to normalize the NLPCONTRIBUTIONS scheme (henceforward, NLPCONTRIBUTIONGRAPH) to structure, directly from article sentences, the contributions information in Natural Language Processing (NLP) scholarly articles via a two-stage annotation methodology: 1) pilot stage - to define the scheme (described in prior work); and 2) adjudication stage - to normalize the graphing model (the focus of this paper). Design/methodology/approach: We re-annotate, a second time, the contributions-pertinent information across 50 prior-annotated NLP scholarly articles in terms of a data pipeline comprising: contribution-centered sentences, phrases, and triple statements. To this end, specifically, care was taken in the adjudication annotation stage to reduce annotation noise while formulating the guidelines for our proposed novel NLP contributions structuring and graphing scheme. Findings: The application of NLPCONTRIBUTIONGRAPH on the 50 articles resulted finally in a dataset of 900 contribution-focused sentences, 4,702 contribution-information-centered phrases, and 2,980 surface-structured triples. The intra-annotation agreement between the first and second stages, in terms of F1, was 67.92% for sentences, 41.82% for phrases, and 22.31% for triple statements indicating that with increased granularity of the information, the annotation decision variance is greater. Practical Implications: We demonstrate NLPCONTRIBUTIONGRAPH data integrated into the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a next-generation KG-based digital library with intelligent computations enabled over structured scholarly knowledge, as a viable aid to assist researchers in their day-to-day tasks.

AISep 16, 2020
SciBERT-based Semantification of Bioassays in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Marco Anteghini, Jennifer D'Souza, Vitor A. P. Martins dos Santos et al.

As a novel contribution to the problem of semantifying biological assays, in this paper, we propose a neural-network-based approach to automatically semantify, thereby structure, unstructured bioassay text descriptions. Experimental evaluations, to this end, show promise as the neural-based semantification significantly outperforms a naive frequency-based baseline approach. Specifically, the neural method attains 72% F1 versus 47% F1 from the frequency-based method.