amc: The Automated Mission Classifier for Telescope Bibliographies

John F. Wu, Joshua E.G. Peek, Sophie J. Miller, Jenny Novacescu, Achu J. Usha, Christopher A. Wilkinson


Abstract
Telescope bibliographies record the pulse of astronomy research by capturing publication statistics and citation metrics for telescope facilities. Robust and scalable bibliographies ensure that we can measure the scientific impact of our facilities and archives. However, the growing rate of publications threatens to outpace our ability to manually label astronomical literature. We therefore present the Automated Mission Classifier (amc), a tool that uses large language models (LLMs) to identify and categorize telescope references by processing large quantities of paper text. A modified version of amc performs well on the TRACS Kaggle challenge, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.84 on the held-out test set. amc is valuable for other telescopes beyond TRACS; we developed the initial software for identifying papers that featured scientific results by NASA missions. Additionally, we investigate how amc can also be used to interrogate historical datasets and surface potential label errors. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based applications offer powerful and scalable assistance for library sciences.
Anthology ID:
2025.wasp-main.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop for Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India and virtual
Editors:
Alberto Accomazzi, Tirthankar Ghosal, Felix Grezes, Kelly Lockhart
Venues:
WASP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
157–169
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.wasp-main.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John F. Wu, Joshua E.G. Peek, Sophie J. Miller, Jenny Novacescu, Achu J. Usha, and Christopher A. Wilkinson. 2025. amc: The Automated Mission Classifier for Telescope Bibliographies. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop for Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications, pages 157–169, Mumbai, India and virtual. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
amc: The Automated Mission Classifier for Telescope Bibliographies (Wu et al., WASP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.wasp-main.18.pdf