Atilla Kaan Alkan

Also published as: Atilla Kaan Alkan


2026

We present our participation in the SOMD 2026 shared task on cross-document software mention coreference resolution, where our systems ranked second across all three subtasks. We compare two fine-tuning-free approaches: Fuzzy Matching (FM), a lexical string-similarity method, and Context Aware Representations (CAR), which combines mention-level and document-level embeddings. Both achieve competitive performance across all subtasks (CoNLL F1 of 0.94–0.96), with CAR consistently outperforming FM by 1 point on the official test set, consistent with the high surface regularity of software names, which reduces the need for complex semantic reasoning. A controlled noise-injection study reveals complementary failure modes: as boundary noise increases, CAR loses only 0.07 F1 points from clean to fully corrupted input, compared to 0.20 for FM, whereas under mention substitution, FM degrades more gracefully (0.52 vs. 0.63). Our inference-time analysis shows that FM scales superlinearly with corpus size, whereas CAR scales approximately linearly, making CAR the more efficient choice at large scale. These findings suggest that system selection should be informed by both the noise profile of the upstream mention detector and the scale of the target corpus. We release our code to support future work on this underexplored task.
Scientific multi-label text classification suffers from extreme class imbalance, where specialized terminology exhibits severe power-law distributions that challenge standard classification approaches. Existing scientific corpora lack comprehensive controlled vocabularies, focusing instead on broad categories and limiting systematic study of extreme imbalance. We introduce AstroConcepts, a corpus of English abstracts from 21,702 published astrophysics papers, labeled with 2,367 concepts from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus. The corpus exhibits severe label imbalance, with 76 % of concepts having fewer than 50 training examples. By releasing this resource, we enable systematic study of extreme class imbalance in scientific domains and establish strong baselines across traditional, neural, and vocabulary-constrained LLM methods. Our evaluation reveals three key patterns that provide new insights into scientific text classification. First, vocabulary-constrained LLMs achieve competitive performance relative to domain-adapted models in astrophysics classification, suggesting a potential for parameter-efficient approaches. Second, domain adaptation yields relatively larger improvements for rare, specialized terminology, although absolute performance remains limited across all methods. Third, we propose frequency-stratified evaluation to reveal performance patterns that are hidden by aggregate scores, thereby making robustness assessment central to scientific multi-label evaluation. These results offer actionable insights for scientific NLP and establish benchmarks for research on extreme imbalance.

2024

Interest in Astrophysical Natural Language Processing (NLP) has increased recently, fueled by the development of specialized language models for information extraction. However, the scarcity of annotated resources for this domain is still a significant challenge. Most existing corpora are limited to Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, leaving a gap in resource diversity. To address this gap and facilitate a broader spectrum of NLP research in astrophysics, we introduce astroECR, an extension of our previously built Time-Domain Astrophysics Corpus (TDAC). Our contributions involve expanding it to cover named entities, coreferences, annotations related to astrophysical relationships, and normalizing celestial object names. We showcase practical utility through baseline models for four NLP tasks and provide the research community access to our corpus, code, and models.
Le manque de ressources annotées constitue un défi majeur pour le traitement automatique de la langue en astrophysique. Afin de combler cette lacune, nous présentons astroECR, une extension du corpus TDAC (Time-Domain Astrophysics Corpus). Notre corpus, constitué de 300 rapports d’observation en anglais, étend le schéma d’annotation initial de TDAC en introduisant cinq classes d’entités nommées supplémentaires spécifiques à l’astrophysique. Nous avons enrichi les annotations en incluant les coréférences, les relations sémantiques entre les objets célestes et leurs propriétés physiques, ainsi qu’en normalisant les noms d’objets célestes via des bases de données astronomiques. L’utilité de notre corpus est démontrée en fournissant des scores de référence à travers quatre tâches~: la reconnaissance d’entités nommées, la résolution de coréférences, la détection de relations, et la normalisation des noms d’objets célestes. Nous mettons à disposition le corpus ainsi que son guide d’annotation, les codes sources, et les modèles associés.

2023

Dans cet article nous étudions l’intérêt de l’augmentation de données pour le repérage d’entités nommées en domaine de spécialité : l’astrophysique. Pour cela, nous comparons trois méthodes d’augmentation en utilisant deux récents corpus annotés du domaine : DEAL et TDAC, tous deux en anglais. Nous avons générés les données artificielles en utilisant des méthodes à base de règles et à base de modèles de langue. Les données ont ensuite été ajoutées de manière itérative pour affiner un système de détection d’entités. Les résultats permettent de constater un effet de seuil : ajouter des données artificielles au-delà d’une certaine quantité ne présente plus d’intérêt et peut dégrader la F-mesure. Sur les deux corpus, le seuil varie selon la méthode employée, et en fonction du modèle de langue utilisé. Cette étude met également en évidence que l’augmentation de données est plus efficace sur de petits corpus, ce qui est cohérent avec d’autres études antérieures. En effet, nos expériences montrent qu’il est possible d’améliorer de 1 point la F-mesure sur le corpus DEAL, et jusqu’à 2 points sur le corpus TDAC.

2022

Detecting Entities in the Astrophysics Literature (DEAL) is a proposed shared task in the scope of the first Workshop on Information Extraction from Scientific Publications (WIESP) at AACL-IJCNLP 2022. It aims to propose systems identifying astrophysical named entities. This article presents our system based on a majority voting strategy of an ensemble composed of multiple SciBERT models. The system we propose is ranked second and outperforms the baseline provided by the organisers by achieving an F1 score of 0.7993 and a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) score of 0.8978 in the testing phase.
The increased interest in time-domain astronomy over the last decades has resulted in a substantial increase in observation reports publication leading to a saturation of how astrophysicists read, analyze and classify information. Due to the short life span of the detected astronomical events, the information related to the characterization of new phenomena has to be communicated and analyzed very rapidly to allow other observatories to react and conduct their follow-up observations. This paper introduces TDAC: the first Corpus in Time-Domain Astrophysics, based on observation reports. We also present the NLP experiments we made for named entity recognition based on annotations we made and annotations from the WIESP NLP Challenge.