We present a new gold-standard dataset and a benchmark for the Research Theme Identification task, a sub-task of the Scholarly Knowledge Graph Generation shared task, at the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing. The objective of the shared task was to label given research papers with research themes from a total of 36 themes. The benchmark was compiled using data drawn from the largest overall assessment of university research output ever undertaken globally (the Research Excellence Framework - 2014). We provide a performance comparison of a transformer-based ensemble, which obtains multiple predictions for a research paper, given its multiple textual fields (e.g. title, abstract, reference), with traditional machine learning models. The ensemble involves enriching the initial data with additional information from open-access digital libraries and Argumentative Zoning techniques (CITATION). It uses a weighted sum aggregation for the multiple predictions to obtain a final single prediction for the given research paper. Both data and the ensemble are publicly available on https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/sdp2022-scholarly-knowledge-graph-generation/data?select=task1_test_no_label.csv and https://github.com/ProjectDoSSIER/sdp2022, respectively.

This paper describes our contribution to the Answer Localization track of the MedVidQA 2022 Shared Task. We propose two answer localization approaches that use only textual information extracted from the video. In particular, our approaches exploit the text extracted from the video’s transcripts along with the text displayed in the video’s frames to create a set of features. Having created a set of features that represents a video’s textual information, we employ four different models to measure the similarity between a video’s segment and a corresponding question. Then, we employ two different methods to obtain the start and end times of the identified answer. One of them is based on a random forest regressor, whereas the other one uses an unsupervised peak detection model to detect the answer’s start time. Our findings suggest that for this task, leveraging only text-related features (transmitted either verbally or visually) and using a small amount of training data, lead to significant improvements over the benchmark Video Span Localization model that is based on deep neural networks.

With the advent of contextualized embeddings, attention towards neural ranking approaches for Information Retrieval increased considerably. However, two aspects have remained largely neglected: i) queries usually consist of few keywords only, which increases ambiguity and makes their contextualization harder, and ii) performing neural ranking on non-English documents is still cumbersome due to shortage of labeled datasets. In this paper we present SIR (Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval) to mitigate both problems by leveraging word sense information. At the core of our approach lies a novel multilingual query expansion mechanism based on Word Sense Disambiguation that provides sense definitions as additional semantic information for the query. Importantly, we use senses as a bridge across languages, thus allowing our model to perform considerably better than its supervised and unsupervised alternatives across French, German, Italian and Spanish languages on several CLEF benchmarks, while being trained on English Robust04 data only. We release SIR at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/sir.