arXiv Computation and Language

Domain-Adaptive Pretraining Enhances Water Treatment Semantic Representation for Large-Scale Structured Literature Mining

The paper introduces WaterBERT, a domain‑adapted encoder model trained on a 2.97‑billion‑token water treatment corpus to capture domain‑specific semantics for literature mining. Fine‑tuned versions of WaterBERT outperform general‑purpose and other domain BERT models on tasks such as treatment process classification, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. The authors also demonstrate WaterBERT’s utility in large‑scale processing, generating coherent research topics, building a structured knowledge graph from 693,211 abstracts, and creating a Water Knowledge‑Enhanced Retrieval System that surpasses text‑based baselines.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

SciNLP: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Full-Text Scientific Entity and Relation Extraction in NLP

SciNLP is a new benchmark dataset for full‑text entity and relation extraction in the NLP domain, comprising 60 manually annotated papers with 6,429 entities and 1,649 relations. It is the first dataset to provide full‑text annotations of entities and their relationships specifically for NLP literature. Experiments show that models trained on SciNLP outperform baselines on certain tasks, and the dataset enabled the automatic construction of a fine‑grained knowledge graph with an average node degree of 3.3.

By Decheng Duan, Yingyi Zhang, Jitong Peng, Chengzhi Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Custom Named Entity Recognition and Topic Classification for Global Health Publications

This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost. "whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."

By Genis Skura, Antoine Geissb\"uhler, Jean-Luc Falcone
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET): Parameter-Efficient Biomedical Domain Adaptation via Priority-Based Embedding Transfer

The paper introduces Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET), a parameter‑efficient method that injects biomedical domain knowledge from large specialized models into a smaller general‑purpose model without retraining on the original specialized corpora. DRET evolves through iterative strategies—tokenizer‑merge (DRET 1.x), hybrid embedding averaging (DRET 2.0), priority‑based embedding transfer (DRET 3.x), and further refinements (DRET 4.x)—and demonstrates that a 66‑million‑parameter DistilBERT can achieve competitive or superior performance on token‑level PICO classification compared to much larger models, while remaining lightweight. The authors validate the embedding‑level transfer with cosine similarity, semantic‑shift, and t‑SNE analyses, highlighting DRET’s potential for scalable, resource‑efficient biomedical text mining.

By Girish Sundaram, Daniel Berleant
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

BELXTR: Biomedical Entity Linking via Contextualized Token Retrieval

BELXTR is a new biomedical entity linking model that uses a multi‑vector (late interaction) architecture to preserve token‑level matching information, unlike traditional embedding‑based approaches that compress mentions into a single vector. By extending the XTR model with a task‑specific training objective and active query expansion, BELXTR achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on half of ten evaluated corpora, with an average 5‑percentage‑point gain in recall@1. The model shows especially strong results on cross‑species gene disambiguation, outperforming an LLM‑powered retrieve‑and‑rerank pipeline and approaching a specialized rule‑based system.

By Samuele Garda, Ulf Leser
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Extracting Dataset Mentions in Forced Displacement and FCV Documents: A Weakly Supervised Framework with LLM-Based Label Refinement

The paper introduces a weakly supervised framework for extracting dataset mentions from forced displacement and Fragile, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) documents. It uses a lightweight model trained on general research literature to generate candidate mentions, which are then refined by a large language model that validates or rejects them and corrects boundaries. The refined annotations are augmented with synthetic and contrastive examples to fine‑tune the model, achieving 74.1% precision and 70.5% recall on a benchmark of 1,706 passages, with higher precision (89.5%) on passages that contain dataset references.

By Rafael Macalaba, Aivin V. Solatorio, Patrick Michael Brock, Olivier Dupriez
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

RATIO: A Benchmark for Retrieval Across Typed Ideation Operations in Scientific Literature

RATIO (Retrieval Across Typed Ideation Operations) is a large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate how well retrieval systems can support scientific inspiration. It defines relevance through three ideation moves—Address, Broaden, and Specify—each targeting different levels of abstraction in literature retrieval. The benchmark is built from millions of full-text CS papers using a novel discourse-marker distant supervision method, and includes extensive LLM and human vetting to ensure quality.

By Maayan Sharon, Tom Hope
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Building evidence-based knowledge bases from full-text literature for disease-specific biomedical reasoning

EvidenceNet is a disease‑specific dataset that transforms full‑text biomedical literature into structured evidence records and graph representations, preserving study design, provenance, and quantitative support. Using an LLM‑assisted pipeline, it extracts experimentally grounded findings, normalizes entities, scores evidence quality, and links related records via typed semantic relations. The released subsets—EvidenceNet‑HCC and EvidenceNet‑CRC—contain thousands of evidence records and richly connected graphs, with high extraction and relation‑type accuracy, enabling retrieval‑augmented question answering and graph‑based tasks such as link prediction and target prioritization.

By Chang Zong, Jinyu Chen, Sicheng Lv, Si-tu Xue, Huilin Zheng, Jian Wan, Lei Zhang