Advancing Scientific Text Classification: Fine-Tuned Models with Dataset Expansion and Hard-Voting
It addresses the problem of handling increasing academic publications for researchers and librarians, but is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
This study tackled scientific text classification by fine-tuning pre-trained language models on an expanded Web of Science dataset, achieving improved accuracy, with domain-specific models like SciBERT and BioBERT outperforming general ones.
Efficient text classification is essential for handling the increasing volume of academic publications. This study explores the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs), including BERT, SciBERT, BioBERT, and BlueBERT, fine-tuned on the Web of Science (WoS-46985) dataset for scientific text classification. To enhance performance, we augment the dataset by executing seven targeted queries in the WoS database, retrieving 1,000 articles per category aligned with WoS-46985's main classes. PLMs predict labels for this unlabeled data, and a hard-voting strategy combines predictions for improved accuracy and confidence. Fine-tuning on the expanded dataset with dynamic learning rates and early stopping significantly boosts classification accuracy, especially in specialized domains. Domain-specific models like SciBERT and BioBERT consistently outperform general-purpose models such as BERT. These findings underscore the efficacy of dataset augmentation, inference-driven label prediction, hard-voting, and fine-tuning techniques in creating robust and scalable solutions for automated academic text classification.