Peer Revenue Publish or profit

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Computer Science Digital Libraries

cs.DL Watch Digital Libraries (sign in to use)

Monday 24 August

Digital Libraries

Beyond FAIR Data: Instrument Traces for Active and Autonomous Scientific Experimentation

Artificial intelligence is turning scientific instruments into active systems in which observations can determine what is measured next. We argue that this creates an additional scientific record, the experimental trajectory, complementing sample provenance, acquired data and metadata, and analysis workflows. Instrument Traces should ultimately be synchronized with Sample Traces describing specimen evolution and Decision Traces recording human or algorithmic choices. We reconstruct an Instrument Trace retrospectively from a longitudinal AFM/PFM archive containing 118,000 timestamped events from 2023-2026. Conventional saved files reveal material campaigns, latent probe and calibration states, session-level complexity, experimental decision grammar, and composite tuning actions. They also expose what is missing, including unsaved tuning and failures, explicit sample/probe identities, complete timing, exogenous state, and decision rationale. We therefore propose a prospective trace architecture that records synchronized sample, instrument, and decision histories, enabling reproducible autonomy, predictive maintenance, counterfactual analysis, operator training, and transfer across facilities.
Read the full abstract

All authors Sergei V. Kalinin, Boris N. Slautin, Yu Liu, Charles Cao

Sunday 23 August

Digital Libraries

Taxonomy-aware distances between scholarly topic profiles via an exact simplex embedding

Topic profiles represent publications, authors, and other scholarly entities as probability distributions over a fixed set of topics, but flat total variation treats every pair of distinct pure-topic profiles as maximally separated and therefore ignores taxonomic proximity. From a rooted weighted taxonomy, we derive a cardinality-normalized linear operator that maps the leaf topics to points in the original probability simplex and exactly realizes a normalized lowest-common-ancestor ultrametric under total variation. The operator is doubly stochastic and positive definite; within the class of nonnegative edge-cluster Gram operators, its normalization is uniquely determined on the reduced branching tree. Applying the same invertible operator to arbitrary topic mixtures yields a nondegenerate hierarchy-aware metric that contracts flat total variation, differs from the tree-Wasserstein distance on mixtures, and can be evaluated in O(|V|+L) time and memory without forming the dense matrix. In a frozen OpenAlex taxonomy with 4,516 terminal Topics, raw dissimilarities between Topic texts showed consistent ordinal alignment with taxonomic proximity, while only 3 of 253 calibrated internal nodes required monotonic correction. Encoder choice nevertheless affected individual height estimates. The framework exactly realizes a supplied weighted hierarchy; text is used only to initialize its node heights, and distances between scholarly topic profiles are then computed in the induced geometry.
Read the full abstract

Friday 21 August

Digital Libraries

The Legibility Gap: How Gender Equity Interventions Redistribute Recognition Across Cultures

Efforts to promote gender equity in science increasingly rely on name-based inference to quantify representation and guide policy and behavior. Yet linguistic cues that signal gender vary across cultures and are often obscured when names are transliterated into English. Here we identify a pattern we call the "legibility gap": when gender is inferred from names, equity interventions systematically benefit women whose names signal gender while bypassing those whose names lose such cues in translation. Using both observational and experimental evidence, we show how this gap reshapes recognition in science. Analyzing citation diversity statements-an emerging practice in which authors report the algorithmically estimated gender composition of their reference lists-we find that papers that include this practice cite women more frequently, but the gains accrue almost entirely to authors with gender-signaling Western names. By contrast, women whose names lose gender cues in English transliteration, predominantly those with East Asian names, receive fewer citations in these same papers. Two preregistered experiments (N = 2,250) corroborate this pattern and identify its mechanism: linguistic legibility, not cultural unfamiliarity, determines who is recognized as a woman and who benefits from policies designed to support women in science. Overall, these findings expose a previously unrecognized layer of inequity embedded in global equity infrastructures. As science becomes increasingly global and equity efforts increasingly algorithmic, the legibility gap reveals how uneven identity recognition reshapes fairness. In global systems of recognition, equity depends not only on whether policies are effective on average, but also on whether they are equitable across cultures.
Read the full abstract

All authors Binglu Wang, Jose Cervantez, Jiahui Xue, Katherine L. Milkman, Dashun Wang

Digital Libraries

From citation intent to knowledge contribution: Classifying what cited papers actually contribute

Understanding the flow and evolution of scientific knowledge is essential for assessing research impact. Existing citation analysis methods mainly focus on citing authors' subjective intents, failing to consistently characterize cited papers' knowledge contributions. This study proposes the Knowledge Contribution Taxonomy (KCT), derived from the Scientific Research Logic Model, which identifies the type of knowledge a cited paper contributes based on the citation context. KCT classifies citations into Method, Resource Tool, Empirical Finding, and Background, further distinguishing core from non-core contributions. We propose a Dual-Path Fusion model for the classification task, which achieves an accuracy of 85.5%, outperforming mainstream large language models. An analysis of 802,202 citations from the ACL Anthology reveals that core knowledge contributions account for only 39.09% of all citations. The core knowledge contribution citation count achieves higher hit rates for award-winning papers than the traditional citation count at all ranking cutoffs, reflecting the value of differentiating knowledge contributions for research evaluation and impact prediction. In dissemination prediction experiments, KCT outperforms citation intent classification, demonstrating its stronger predictive validity for scholarly dissemination. By focusing on the knowledge contributions of cited papers, the KCT can support differentiated research evaluation.
Read the full abstract

All authors Zhibang Quan, Zhentao Liang, Ming Ma, Jinyu Wei, Gang Li, Jin Mao

Digital Libraries

Analysis of Potential Generative AI Use in Abstracts of KAKENHI-Funded Projects

This study analyzes the extent to which abstracts of projects funded under the Scientific Research (C) category of the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) were classified as AI-generated. The analysis covers projects funded over the five-year period from FY2022 to FY2026. The number of abstracts classified as AI-generated began to increase in FY2025, and approximately 20% of the abstracts were classified as AI-generated in FY2026. Although the proportions varied to some extent, abstracts classified as AI-generated were observed in many review categories. These findings indicate that the use of generative AI has begun to spread across many research fields represented in Scientific Research (C).
Read the full abstract

Thursday 20 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Balancing Reasoning and Hardware Constraints in RAG Pipelines for Ukrainian Multi-Domain Document Understanding

This paper describes the system submitted to the UNLP 2026 Shared Task on Multi-Domain Document Understanding. The challenge required extracting precise answers, document IDs, and page numbers from a diverse corpus of Ukrainian PDF documents within a strict 9-hour offline Kaggle execution limit. During evaluation on the hidden private test set, optical character recognition (OCR) of scanned documents emerged as a severe bottleneck, consuming 5-7 hours of the total time budget due to sequential single-threaded execution. This overhead strictly limited the remaining time for Large Language Model (LLM) inference to approximately two hours for 500 questions. To guarantee pipeline completion without timeouts, we developed a resource-efficient Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline utilizing BM25, BGE-M3, and Cross-Encoder reranking. Rather than deploying parameter-heavy reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) which consistently timed out, we utilized a 4-bit quantized LapaLLM 12B model via llama.cpp on dual NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Prioritizing pipeline stability over multi-step reasoning, our system achieved a Private Score of 0.8095, placing 10th out of 15 active teams.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

A large-scale dataset of sub-institution name disambiguation and hierarchical structures from OpenAlex

Accurate attribution of scholarly work to specific sub-institutional units, such as schools or departments of a university, is crucial for granular research assessment and policymaking. While robust identifiers exist for top-level institutions, standardized data for sub-level units remains scarce due to the linguistic and structural variability of affiliation strings. In this study, we introduce OpenSubAffil, a large-scale dataset mapping raw affiliation strings from OpenAlex to disambiguated sub-institutional entities and their hierarchical structures. We developed a pipeline integrating named entity recognition (NER) with embedding-based clustering. Furthermore, we proposed a multi-signal scoring function that synthesizes lexical and co-occurrence evidence to reconstruct the sub-institutional hierarchy. OpenSubAffil comprises mappings for 40 million affiliation strings to 638,843 disambiguated sub-units across 18,635 top-level institutions, together with their hierarchical relationships. Validation against Wikidata benchmarks and manual investigation show that our method achieves promising performance. Overall, this dataset bridges the granularity gap between individual researchers and top-level institutions, enabling high-resolution analyses of scholarly output and communication at the sub-institutional level. The OpenSubAffil dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19602782.
Read the full abstract

Wednesday 19 August

Digital Libraries

A Pathway for Assessing Grey Literature: Leveraging AI to Extract Conference Metadata and Organiser Information from Calls for Papers

Despite its importance, grey literature, including Calls for Papers (CfPs), remains largely overlooked in Metascience and Scientometric analysis due to its unstructured, highly heterogeneous format, which traditional tools struggle to process at scale. However, Large Language Models now offer a pivotal opportunity to devise innovative tools for systematically harvesting and processing such data. In this paper, we introduce COCI, an AI-based framework that automates the extraction of granular, structured metadata from raw CfP text. COCI employs a multi-stage pipeline for entity extraction, followed by author disambiguation against OpenAlex and semantic mapping of topics and conference series. This process identifies key data points, including conference editions, geographic locations, and comprehensive lists of organisers, along with their specific roles and affiliations. By structuring this previously inaccessible information, COCI establishes a foundation for the systematic analysis of grey literature, enabling new research opportunities and shifting the scholarly focus towards non-publisher-based events.
Read the full abstract

All authors Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne, Alexis Vizcaino, Aliaksandr Birukou, Enrico Motta

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Qualified Cross-References as a Verification Method: The Normative Environment of the EU AI Act

Legal cross-references are commonly represented as links between instruments or provisions. In a curated legal knowledge base, a link must also identify the legal character of the interaction, its supporting provisions and conditions, and remain consistent from either instrument. This paper presents a provision-level model and a protocol for qualified cross-references, developed through a bilingual corpus of fourteen instruments surrounding Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the AI Act). The model distinguishes direct textual reference, bounded presumption of conformity, substantive interaction without textual reference, mediated intersection, and institutional analogy; applicative interaction and definitional overlap are independent dimensions. Its methodological contribution is bidirectional inversion: a relationship documented from act A towards act B is reconstructed from B's perspective against both instruments. This verification tests provisions, qualification, direction, and conditions before deciding how to render the relationship from either side. Applied during construction, the protocol surfaced six incorrect article references, three inaccurate legal qualifications, and one divergence between two published descriptions of the same interaction. A reference to Regulation (EU) 2019/881 illustrates why qualification matters: the AI Act's bounded cybersecurity presumption differs from other product legislation's uses of the same certification framework. The contribution is a map of one regulatory environment and an explicitly specified method for making curated cross-reference knowledge bases inspectable and internally testable. A later, separately scoped corpus audit is discussed among the limitations, without pooling its findings with the original measurements; limited access to historical inputs constrains independent reproduction.
Read the full abstract

2608.19194 · 19 Aug · Clarified the scope of validation, the status of the registry sample, and the limits of reproducibility. Added a concise discussion distinguishing source fidelity, technical functionality, and legal verification, informed by a separate local audit. Results of the original inversion study are unchanged

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Institutional Books - Enriched Text: A customizable multilingual open-source pipeline for denoising, deduplicating, and annotating OCR text at scale

Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged between standard large-scale preprocessing practices and the goals of careful information stewardship. Many existing pipelines optimize for web text: as a result, they tend to aggressively filter, deduplicate, restrict by language, and sometimes discard meaningful metadata. Meanwhile, researchers seeking to use IB-HL duplicate effort while performing similar processing and analysis. We describe an approach that we call Enriched Text. Instead of producing a single 'complete' stream of tokens, we normalize the text while preserving metadata through annotations. We separate endmatter, detect per-paragraph language, identify clusters of duplicate paragraphs, and compute per-paragraph bits-per-byte scores. We provide this information through HTML-like annotations layered on top of the text. By parsing these annotations, users can tailor the output to their own needs instead of accepting a global editorial decision on content. The pipeline applies to all $\approx$250 languages in the collection. This report describes this project's goals, implementation, and design rationale. The release includes IB-HL-ET (an enriched-text version of IB-HL containing 217B o200k_base tokens across 983,003 volumes, organized into 1.39B annotated subtopic paragraphs) and the pipeline that produced it. These serve to make the collection easier for machines to parse and for humans to study.
Read the full abstract

All authors David Lowry-Duda, Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan Zittrain

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Institutional Newspapers Pipeline: Deriving billions of high quality tokens from historical newspapers

Historical newspapers are an abundant record of public life, but their dense, irregular and sometimes noisy layouts make computational access to these materials both challenging and limited. We present the Institutional Newspapers Pipeline, a modular system we jointly designed with Boston Public Library to extract high-quality, structured datasets from historical newspaper scans. It was architected so that each step remains interpretable and customizable, and so that the pipeline as a whole remains computationally frugal enough to run on workstation-level hardware. The pipeline runs each scan through a multi-step process: it segments scans into individual type-agnostic crops and performs OCR on each resulting segment before then performing text analysis, type classification, reading order detection, named entities recognition, subject classification, language detection, and pre-computed embeddings generation on every crop. We ran this pipeline against a portion of Boston Public Library's holdings and released the results as an open dataset. The optical character recognition (OCR) output represents 16.3 billion o200k_base tokens across 83.1 million individual crops, extracted from 1,473,635 public domain newspaper scans published between 1795 and 1930. This report describes our methods for each processing step, the small models we trained, as well as the evaluation results and dataset-scale measurements we collected in the process. It accompanies the release of the pipeline, models, and dataset. We position this work as a substantial step towards unlocking high-quality data from tens of millions of newspaper scans.
Read the full abstract

All authors Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Eben English, Jake Sadow, Kacie Bailey, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jessica Chapel, Jonathan Zittrain

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Institutional Books - Visual Elements: An open-source pipeline for extracting, classifying, deduplicating, and captioning visual elements from digital book collections

Historical book collections contain rich visual elements - such as illustrations, photographs, engravings, and decorative art - that are frequently under-explored in large-scale digitization projects. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has standardized the extraction of textual content, these visual components offer a layer of nuance and context that remains largely untapped by automated text extraction workflows. This technical report introduces Institutional Books - Visual Elements, an open-source end-to-end pipeline for detecting, classifying, deduplicating, and captioning visual elements from historical book collections. Alongside this pipeline, we release an initial dataset of 22.6 million visual elements extracted from the 983,004 scanned volumes that comprise the Institutional Books: Harvard Library dataset. This work contributes to ongoing, community-wide efforts to enable new use cases for digitized library collections through computational access, from artificial intelligence model training to digital humanities research.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jimmy Mendez, Matteo Cargnelutti, David Lowry-Duda, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan Zittrain

Digital Libraries

MediaGraph: A Content-Aware Data Model and Query Framework for Multimodal Knowledge Graphs

Multimodal knowledge graphs typically treat multimedia documents as opaque, external entities. This content-agnostic approach constrains retrieval and analysis by isolating media from the graph's core structure, hindering the ability to capture and query complex relationships across media types. To address this, we introduce the MediaGraph Data Model and its prototypical implementation MeGraS, the MediaGraph Store, a novel approach that integrates multimedia content as graph nodes. This paradigm shift enables the query engine to directly access and process a document's intrinsic content, allowing for native operations such as feature-based similarity search, dynamic segmentation, and the inference of non-materialized relations. By extending the SPARQL query language, MeGraS provides a cohesive platform for the storage, management, and expressive querying of multimodal data. MeGraS is open-source software that establishes a new framework, moving the field toward content-aware multimodal knowledge graphs.
Read the full abstract

Tuesday 18 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from physics.soc-ph

Computational Prosopography across a Millennium: Mathematically Oriented Lineages Traced from the Fields Medalists

We reconstruct the mentor–student network through which documented scholarly training passed across roughly nine centuries, and subject both the network and the means of reconstructing it to source criticism. From Wikidata, which aggregates the Mathematics Genealogy Project and the MacTutor Archive, we extract approximately 470,000 mentor–student assertions, yielding a directed acyclic graph of 372,853 persons. Using all 64 historical Fields Medalists as a fixed, ex ante tracer set, backward traversal enumerates some 25.5 million distinct paths reaching 57 generations. Three structural observations follow. Genealogical traffic through Leibniz forms an hourglass: thin upstream, 5.3 paths per node on average, and thick downstream, 53.4, a ratio near 10:1, with no counterpart at Newton, who lies on only four of the 64 lineages. Across a window centered on Leibniz, seven independently extracted predicate dimensions reorganize together, and recorded learned-society membership rises from 6.5 to 82.1 percent of the cohort. Upstream, 54 of the 64 lineages converge on the same five twelfth- and thirteenth-century Islamic and Byzantine scholars before terminating at an eleventh-century boundary we name the Monastery Wall. We argue that such observations cannot be assessed without tool criticism. The traversal engine is algebraically reversible, so every ranking decision it makes can be reconstructed afterward. We characterize its measurement bias in closed form, show that the macro-structures survive switching that bias off, and report the family of lineages the traversal returns at different resolutions rather than a single ranked list.
Read the full abstract

Monday 17 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.SE

A Multi-Surface Consistency Audit of Software Citation Metadata

Research software projects describe themselves in many places at once: citation files in the repository, archive deposits, DOI registry records, package registries, and README text. We treat the software as the underlying object and these machine-readable self-descriptions as its surfaces: the points where people and automated systems read what the project declares about the software. Citation guidance, indexing services, and automated agents may read a different subset of these surfaces, so disagreement between them can silently fragment credit and provenance. This paper asks a simple question that has not been measured directly: when a project's own metadata surfaces are compared with each other, how often do they agree? We audited 117 open-source research software projects, comprising an 87-project high-performance computing and quantum computing corpus and a 30-project registered baseline drawn from the JOSS and pyOpenSci accepted-package lists, across up to seven machine-readable surfaces per project. Using a four-level verdict rubric across six metadata fields, with 98.5% hand-verified verdict precision on a 338-row stratified sample, we found that 52 of the 62 projects exposing at least two comparable surfaces (83.9%) contain at least one core-field conflict, a result that is insensitive to the fuzzy-matching threshold. Half of hand-adjudicated cross-surface conflicts trace to a single mechanism: surfaces describing the software's paper rather than the software itself. Among projects whose CITATION.cff includes a preferred citation, 28 of 32 route citations to a record that disagrees with the software's own metadata. The author lists and titles disagree the most, and the registry surfaces are the least aligned. We release the audit pipeline as an importable library, the corpus, the registered sampling protocol, all raw snapshots, and the complete verification log.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from physics.soc-ph

Declining Modularity of Intellectual Bases During the Emergence of Research Areas

Understanding how research areas emerge can help identify nascent areas early and inform research strategy, yet how the intellectual base of a field restructures as an area takes shape remains unclear. We hypothesize that the emergence of a research area is accompanied by the integration of largely separate knowledge communities, observable as a decline in the modularity of its co-citation network, which represents its intellectual base. We propose a framework that tracks this modularity over time, evaluates the statistical robustness of its changes, and identifies the papers highly associated with the decline. We applied it to three areas with different modes of growth: higher-order network science, superstring theory, and graph representation learning. In all three, modularity declined in correspondence with each area's emergence or transformation, and in superstring theory, the decline aligns with an independently documented transition. Further analysis of higher-order network science shows that its decline reflects a cross-disciplinary integration. In graph representation learning, the gradual decline is followed by a rise, which we interpret as a re-differentiation after the emergence period. Our results suggest that a decline in the modularity of a co-citation network can serve as a structural signature that retrospectively characterizes this integrative mode of emergence.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

Estimating global article processing charges paid to 14 publishers for open access between 2019 and 2025

This study presents estimates of the global expenditure on article processing charges (APCs) paid to 14 publishers for open access (OA) between 2019 and 2025. APCs are charged for publishing in fully OA journals (gold) and making individual articles OA in subscription journals (hybrid), but how much is paid, and for which articles, is not publicly known. We therefore curated an open dataset of publicly listed APC prices from 14 academic publishers (ACS, CUP, De Gruyter, EDP, Elsevier, Frontiers, IEEE, IOP, MDPI, OUP, PLOS, Sage, Springer Nature, and Wiley) and combined it with counts of OA articles from OpenAlex. We estimate that \$15.08 billion (in 2025 USD) was spent globally on APCs between 2019 and 2025. Adjusted for inflation, annual spending quadrupled from \$0.9 billion in 2019 to \$3.7 billion in 2025, with >85% concentrated among a few large publishers. Hybrid OA fees exceed gold fees, and the median fee paid is higher than the median price listed for both. Our approach addresses major limitations in previous efforts to estimate APC spending, offering much-needed insight into an opaque aspect of scholarly publishing, especially as transformative agreements make it more challenging to understand the costs of publishing OA.
Read the full abstract

All authors Lisa Matthias, Eric Schares, Juan Pablo Alperin, Leigh-Ann Butler, Sherry Kuang, Nina Schönfelder, Stefanie Haustein

Sunday 16 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from math.CV

The Geometric Function Atlas: A Software System for Radius and Coefficient Problems

Let $\D=\{z\in\C:|z|<1\}$, and let $\mathcal A$ be the class of analytic functions normalized by $f(0)=0$ and $f'(0)=1$. For an admissible Ma–Minda generator $\varphi$, write $\Sstar{\varphi}=\{f\in\mathcal A:zf'(z)/f(z)\prec\varphi(z)\}$. Given two generators $\varphi_1$ and $\varphi_2$, we study the largest $R\in(0,1]$ for which $f(rz)/r\in\Sstar{\varphi_2}$ whenever $f\in\Sstar{\varphi_1}$ and $0<r\le R$. We present the Geometric Function Atlas, a software system that records these directed radius problems and coefficient problems by their exact generators, parameter domains, normalizations, and sharpness statements. This representation identifies the same class across alternative names and transliterations while keeping the two directions of an inclusion problem distinct. The coefficient engine recovers all 216 Fekete–Szegő values predicted by the general Ma–Minda formula across 36 registered classes. The directed-radius atlas contains 702 ordered comparisons; omitting direction merges unequal constants in 253 of the 262 class-pair families represented in both directions. Using boundary contact, analytic majorants, and explicit Ma–Minda extremals, we prove nineteen exact sharp inclusion radii. In particular, the sine-to-modified-sigmoid radius is $\arcsin((e-1)/(e+1))$, improving the published sufficient radius $\operatorname{arsinh}((e-1)/(e+1))$ by 7.45%. For the crescent and exponential classes, the reciprocal sharp radii are $\sin1$ and $\log(1+\sqrt2)$; the latter corrects a published constant. The Python package, exact certificates, and registry records accompany the paper.
Read the full abstract

All authors Prasanna Devadiga, Kishan Gurumurthy, Arya Suneesh, Pushparaj Devadiga, Asha Sebastian

Friday 14 August

Digital Libraries

A dataset of article processing charges from 14 scholarly publishers, 2019-2025

This paper introduces a dataset of APCs produced from the price lists of 14 large scholarly publishers between 2019 and 2025. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD, AUD) for 12,540 unique journals and 69,856 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.
Read the full abstract

All authors Lisa Matthias, Diego Chavarro, Eric Schares, Juan Pablo Alperin, Margaret Rose, Molly Frost, Flavia Camargo, Jonas Höfting, Leigh-Ann Butler, Nina Schönfelder, Stefanie Haustein

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.AI

A Pathway to General-Purpose Scientific AI: Multimodal Comprehension of Scientific Images

Scientific figures and tables encode essential experimental evidence, yet remain difficult for digital libraries and multimodal AI systems to retrieve and interpret. The ALD/E-ImageMiner benchmark and ICDAR 2026 Competition on Information Extraction from Atomic Layer Deposition/Etching Scientific Figures provide 1,951 figures from 205 publications, expert-annotated for classification, data table extraction, summarization, and visual question answering. In these companion proceedings, we present a forward-looking perspective on how the benchmark can guide future scientific-image challenges. We examine how its tasks probe capabilities from visual and quantitative reading to domain-grounded reasoning and evidential justification, and how Bloom-informed question design can support deeper scientific understanding. We propose "scientific conceptual understanding from images" as a long-term benchmark objective, with future directions including broader domains and figure types, contextual and cross-document synthesis, hypothesis evaluation, provenance, uncertainty, counterfactual grounding, and open-ended multimodal research. This perspective connects the ICDAR 2026 challenge to a broader agenda for machine-actionable scientific visual knowledge and verifiable multimodal scientific AI.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jennifer D'Souza, Fahad Ahmed, Cecilia Andrea Bustamante Andrade, Lina Frolova, Poorani Gnanasambandan, Dilshad Hussain, Muhammad Uzair Khan, Nkembeng Kevin Nkengfoa, Paul Praveen J., Fabio Priante, Sjoerd Franciscus van der Werf, Thomas Frederik Jan van Roeden

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.SD

The MPB Corpus: A Dataset of Melody, Rhythm, Harmony, and Melody-Harmony Relationships in Brazilian Popular Music

PLEASE CHECK AND REFER TO THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS PAPER ON https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.357 This paper presents the MPB Corpus, a dataset of Brazilian Popular Music (Musica Popular Brasileira, MPB) comprising derived symbolic annotations for 500 pieces across four musical parameters – melodic contour, melodic rhythm, harmony, and the melody-harmony relationship – making it the most comprehensive dataset to date for computational musicology of Brazilian music. It is released under a CC-BY-4.0 license in an open, machine-readable tabular format, with documentation and reproducible analysis code. Because the annotations were derived from copyrighted musical scores, the corpus contains no audio recordings or score-level representations such as MIDI or MusicXML; it nonetheless provides a reusable resource for MIR research on a culturally significant repertoire that remains underrepresented in existing datasets. To support the encoding process, we introduce analytical models for capturing rhythmic and melodic information, along with tailored visualizations and summary metrics. Finally, we present a brief exploratory analysis illustrating the dataset's potential for formulating and addressing musicological questions about the genre.
Read the full abstract

Thursday 13 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Emergence of Transfer Learning towards Specific Identification of Alzheimer's Disease A Prospective Approach

Worldwide, millions of senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer disease abbreviated as AD, a well- versed form of dementia. AD is featured by amnesia, intellectual disability, and difficulty with consciousness. DL and ML models are undoubtedly explored to identify AD related patterns on large dimensional neuroimaging data but they need global optimization and are suffering from overfitting issue that might yield dissatisfactory result in testing data set. DL overcomes the issue by convolution of input image with kernel but any sudden change in the MRI image or human manipulation, limited pre- processing of the images can mislead CNN in achieving highly accurate detection. Transfer Learning (TL) has proved itself in AD diagnosis by utilizing pre-trained models on large data sets to guide novice model in a new neuroimaging dataset. This review provides an inclusive glimpse of TL implication in classification, identification including the conversion of AD. Keeping in view, we have assessed the strengths and limitations of TL in improvising diagnostic accuracy even with limited data. The uniqueness of the present review is the incorporation of explainable AI in TL based AD diagnosis system. Finally, it can be claimed that the review will guide the new re-searchers in the area of TL induced neurodegenerative disease detection.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

Co-leading Teams Drive Scientific Novelty in Large-scale Research Infrastructures

Large-scale research infrastructures (LSRIs) have become the engine of modern scientific discovery. While these big machines predominantly operate under a user-oriented model where external teams conduct research with support from in-house researchers, the structural integration of staff scientists into user teams and its association with scientific novelty remains unclear. By leveraging a dataset of 273,109 publications across 76 global LSRIs and applying a hybrid machine-learning framework to classify papers into three collaboration patterns: external user only, staff participating, and staff co-leading, we find a distinct novelty premium for external teams that formally integrate staff as co-authors, especially when staff scientists play co-leading rather than participating roles. Further, the premium peaks at a relatively balanced user-staff team composition, potentially due to an "epistemic lock-in" by either party. Crucially, we find that the ideal collaboration architecture evolves with user experience: while newcomers can obtain a large novelty premium from mere staff participation, experienced users only benefit from staff co-leading teams. This result suggests a "knowledge saturation effect" for which a deeper intellectual partnership is needed to sustain novelty. By revealing how user-staff collaboration structure drives scientific creativity, our study offers practical policy implications for the strategic management and intervention of LSRIs in the era of human-machine collaboration.
Read the full abstract

All authors Mingze Zhang, Yizhan Li, Hao Peng, Zexia Li

Wednesday 12 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.AI

From Extraction to Governed Memory: Multi-Agent Knowledge Graph Construction with Domain-Expert Review

Knowledge graphs used by agentic systems are often treated as flat stores of extracted triples, with little record of who owns a fact, why it was admitted, or how it should be used downstream. We argue that reliable agentic knowledge systems require governance as an essential component of graph construction to bridge this gap. We propose MAGG, a principled multi-agent framework for constructing Governed Knowledge Graphs that introduces explicit governance decisions for reliable and trustworthy knowledge sharing. A domain classifier first induces entity and relation types directly from document content, enabling operation in open-world settings without fixed schemas. Candidate triples are assigned to domain owners, reviewed against supporting evidence, admitted through governance decisions, and stored with audit metadata. The same ownership structure is reused during question answering, where queries are routed to domain-specific graph experts rather than answered through undifferentiated retrieval. Our evaluation demonstrates MAGG's effectiveness: On SciERC, MAGG improves strict triple F1 by 47% and mapped triple F1 by 51% over flat insertion. A blinded review of 120 triples finds governed-only triples more often source-supported than flat-only ones, and revised triples supported in 100% of cases. Finally, on MuSiQue, MAGG outperforms Microsoft GraphRAG by 9.0 exact-match points and 11.2 token-F1 points.
Read the full abstract

All authors Pranav Bykampadi, Neel Mokaria, Vishesh Narayan, Faizan Wajid, Ashok Agrawala

Digital Libraries

Is this Citation on Point?

In 2023, a New York judge sanctioned two attorneys in Mata v. Avianca for filing a brief with hallucinated citations generated by ChatGPT. Such failures are largely caught by database lookups; the harder problem is detecting citations that point to real cases but do not support the propositions for which they are offered – a failure mode that existing evaluations of LLMs for legal use cases largely overlook. In this paper, we study proposition-level citation support verification through controlled perturbations of real legal citations obtained from two legal corpora, either replacing the cited case or changing only the pinpoint page within the same case. We evaluate fourteen model configurations on the resulting examples. Models catch 93-100% of wrong-case corruptions. They catch only 37-61% of wrong-pinpoint corruptions on court opinions and 52-83% on legal briefs. When models fail to catch wrong-pinpoint corruptions, they accept the citation based on topical overlap rather than page-level support. Scale and extended reasoning narrow the gap but do not close it: GPT-5.4 with high reasoning effort still misses 40% of pinpoint mismatches on court opinions and 18% on briefs. Prompting the model to verify support at the cited page improves recall, but it also raises the false positive rate. Recognizing the right legal topic and verifying support for the cited proposition are distinct capabilities, and current models conflate them.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

Domus: An Open-Data Web Platform for House History Research

House history – the record of who lived in a building, who owned it, and how its address changed over time – is a central concern of genealogical and local history research. Wikidata and OpenHistoricalMap together provide an open-data infrastructure, CC0-licensed and capable of representing this data: Wikidata through its linked-data property model with temporal qualifiers, OpenHistoricalMap through historical building footprints with start and end dates. What has been missing is a domain-specific tool that makes contributing and discovering building history accessible to genealogists and local historians. Domus fills this role: a map-based web platform that guides users through structured, crowdsourced editing of building records in Wikidata and displays corresponding OpenHistoricalMap footprints. The application requires no custom backend – authentication, data reading, and data writing all operate through public APIs in the browser, and all data are stored under CC0 in public collaborative databases. This paper describes the genealogical data model, the architecture, and key technical design decisions.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.CL

When the Knowledge Base Becomes the Gold Standard: Measuring Resource-Shared Evaluation Loops in Entity-Level Machine Translation

The Seungjeongwon Ilgi, a UNESCO Memory of the World record, is only 37.4% translated, and the most conspicuous failure mode in automatic translation is the person name – a misread name corrupts the historical fact rather than merely the surface. Low-resource historical domains have no expert gold standard for entity translation, so practitioners substitute a knowledge base (KB) for the gold. That KB is the same resource injected into the system: scoring becomes self-referential and the metric measures instruction compliance rather than translation quality. We measure this loop. Using expert person-name annotations from the National Institute of Korean History as a gold independent of the injection pipeline, we hold the entity set fixed and vary only the provenance of the correct reading. Of 527 expert-annotated mentions, only 31.1% lie outside the injection pipeline, and the residual loop is not uniform – in the overlapping segment the injected reading agrees with the human translation 97.8% of the time against 70.1% in the independent one, so the segment that looks healthiest is the one the loop is holding up. Across four models, a difference-in-differences analysis shows the gain from KB injection is confined to the segment whose gold shares the injected resource; in the independent segment it is at or below zero. Post-injection preservation clusters in a narrow 0.910-0.996 band even though baseline capability differs fivefold, so the reported gain is the complement of prior performance and weaker models appear to improve more dramatically. On an independent sample built by removing the construction filter, the measure replicates within model (overlapping intervals) while discriminating between models (non-overlapping intervals) – it reflects a property of the model, not of the sample.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jinhyung Bae, Dain Kil, Seongmin Oh, Seungmin Lee

Tuesday 11 August

Digital Libraries · Cross-listed from cs.IR

A Semantic Approach to the Academic Publishing Network: Document Vector Representations and Hybrid Structural-Semantic Fusion over OpenAlex Data

Structural graph analysis of the academic publishing network captures the topological relationships between entities but does not see the content of works. Building on our structural approach, this work complements it with a semantic layer and a parameterized structural-semantic fusion. We represent scientific documents by citation-informed vector embeddings (SPECTER2) and store them in an embedded vector database keyed by the stable OpenAlex ID, so that they connect directly to the graph layer. We define a modular late-fusion function that combines semantic similarity (cosine of embeddings) and structural similarity (bibliographic coupling) with a tunable weight alpha whose value is chosen according to the specific task. On the corpus of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava we show two things: citation-informed embeddings agree with the expert OpenAlex topical taxonomy better than a TF-IDF baseline, and in a recommendation use case the structural, semantic, and combined signals carry information in different regimes depending on the available data. Hybrid fusion here is not a universally better method but an explicit mechanism for steering complementary signals according to the task. We release the whole approach as an open-source extension of the apnet library with a reproducible workflow.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

Patterns of Research Funding Across Research Subjects: The Case of NSERC

Funding agencies aim to maximize scientific output from the resources they allocate, a goal that may inadvertently reinforce cumulative advantage within funding systems. Focusing on research areas within Natural Sciences and Engineering (NSE), this study examines the distribution of Canadian research funding over time, with particular attention to the extent to which certain subjects gain prominence as emerging or high-growth fields, while others experience relative stagnation or decline. The results indicate that many research subject groups receiving decreased funding in recent years are concentrated in the pure sciences and mathematics. In contrast, social sciences and medical sciences, which initially had relatively low average funding per grant application, have demonstrated increasing funding trends over time. These findings offer valuable insights for funding agencies seeking to design policies that promote more effective and equitable allocation of resources.
Read the full abstract

Digital Libraries

Characterizing Peace Through Scientific Keywords

This study aims to show that peace, as reflected in scientific research, is not a neutral or uniform concept but is constructed differently across disciplines and geopolitical contexts. To do this, this study analyzes differences in the use of keywords among scholarly publications aligned with SDG 16 across various disciplinary, societal, and national contexts, and identifies which keywords are most strongly associated with countries exhibiting higher versus lower levels of societal peace. Results show that while peace-related research is strongly centered on violence, it is interpreted through distinct lenses: technological and forensic approaches in biomedical and NSE fields, and institutional, legal, and societal perspectives in the social sciences. At the country level, violence remains a central anchor, but its framing varies with levels of peace, with higher-peace countries embedding it within welfare, health, and social systems, and lower-peace countries emphasizing conflict, security, and geopolitics. These results could contribute to shaping both research priorities and science policy initiatives.
Read the full abstract