A Hybrid AI Methodology for Generating Ontologies of Research Topics from Scientific Paper Corpora

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pisu, Alessia, Pompianu, Livio, Osborne, Francesco, Recupero, Diego Reforgiato, Riboni, Daniele, Salatino, Angelo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pisu, Alessia
Pompianu, Livio
Osborne, Francesco
Recupero, Diego Reforgiato
Riboni, Daniele
Salatino, Angelo
author_facet Pisu, Alessia
Pompianu, Livio
Osborne, Francesco
Recupero, Diego Reforgiato
Riboni, Daniele
Salatino, Angelo
contents Taxonomies and ontologies of research topics (e.g., MeSH, UMLS, CSO, NLM) play a central role in providing the primary framework through which intelligent systems can explore and interpret the literature. However, these resources have traditionally been manually curated, a process that is time-consuming, prone to obsolescence, and limited in granularity. This paper presents Sci-OG, a semi-auto\-mated methodology for generating research topic ontologies, employing a multi-step approach: 1) Topic Discovery, extracting potential topics from research papers; 2) Relationship Classification, determining semantic relationships between topic pairs; and 3) Ontology Construction, refining and organizing topics into a structured ontology. The relationship classification component, which constitutes the core of the system, integrates an encoder-based language model with features describing topic occurrence in the scientific literature. We evaluate this approach against a range of alternative solutions using a dataset of 21,649 manually annotated semantic triples. Our method achieves the highest F1 score (0.951), surpassing various competing approaches, including a fine-tuned SciBERT model and several LLM baselines, such as the fine-tuned GPT4-mini. Our work is corroborated by a use case which illustrates the practical application of our system to extend the CSO ontology in the area of cybersecurity. The presented solution is designed to improve the accessibility, organization, and analysis of scientific knowledge, thereby supporting advancements in AI-enabled literature management and research exploration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Hybrid AI Methodology for Generating Ontologies of Research Topics from Scientific Paper Corpora
Pisu, Alessia
Pompianu, Livio
Osborne, Francesco
Recupero, Diego Reforgiato
Riboni, Daniele
Salatino, Angelo
Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Taxonomies and ontologies of research topics (e.g., MeSH, UMLS, CSO, NLM) play a central role in providing the primary framework through which intelligent systems can explore and interpret the literature. However, these resources have traditionally been manually curated, a process that is time-consuming, prone to obsolescence, and limited in granularity. This paper presents Sci-OG, a semi-auto\-mated methodology for generating research topic ontologies, employing a multi-step approach: 1) Topic Discovery, extracting potential topics from research papers; 2) Relationship Classification, determining semantic relationships between topic pairs; and 3) Ontology Construction, refining and organizing topics into a structured ontology. The relationship classification component, which constitutes the core of the system, integrates an encoder-based language model with features describing topic occurrence in the scientific literature. We evaluate this approach against a range of alternative solutions using a dataset of 21,649 manually annotated semantic triples. Our method achieves the highest F1 score (0.951), surpassing various competing approaches, including a fine-tuned SciBERT model and several LLM baselines, such as the fine-tuned GPT4-mini. Our work is corroborated by a use case which illustrates the practical application of our system to extend the CSO ontology in the area of cybersecurity. The presented solution is designed to improve the accessibility, organization, and analysis of scientific knowledge, thereby supporting advancements in AI-enabled literature management and research exploration.
title A Hybrid AI Methodology for Generating Ontologies of Research Topics from Scientific Paper Corpora
topic Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04213