Talk2Ref: A Dataset for Reference Prediction from Scientific Talks

Frederik Yannick Broy, Maike Züfle, Jan Niehues


Abstract
Scientific talks are a growing medium for disseminating research, and automatically identifying relevant literature that grounds or enriches a talk would be highly valuable for researchers and students alike. We introduce Reference Prediction from Talks (RPT), a new task that maps long, and unstructured scientific presentations to relevant papers. To support research on RPT, we present Talk2Ref, the first large-scale dataset of its kind, containing 6,279 talks and 43,429 cited papers (26 per talk on average), where relevance is approximated by the papers cited in the talk’s corresponding source publication. We establish strong baselines by evaluating state-of-the-art text embedding models in zero-shot retrieval scenarios, and propose a dual-encoder architecture trained on Talk2Ref. We further explore strategies for handling long transcripts, as well as training for domain adaptation. Our results show that fine-tuning on Talk2Ref significantly improves citation prediction performance, demonstrating both the challenges of the task and the effectiveness of our dataset for learning semantic representations from spoken scientific content. The dataset and trained models are released under an open license to foster future research on integrating spoken scientific communication into citation recommendation systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
357–371
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-024
DOI:
10.63317/5axffrnj6tm8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederik Yannick Broy, Maike Züfle, and Jan Niehues. 2026. Talk2Ref: A Dataset for Reference Prediction from Scientific Talks. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 357–371, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Talk2Ref: A Dataset for Reference Prediction from Scientific Talks (Broy et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: