In this paper, we provide an overview of the SV-Ident shared task as part of the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING 2022. In the shared task, participants were provided with a sentence and a vocabulary of variables, and asked to identify which variables, if any, are mentioned in individual sentences from scholarly documents in full text. Two teams made a total of 9 submissions to the shared task leaderboard. While none of the teams improve on the baseline systems, we still draw insights from their submissions. Furthermore, we provide a detailed evaluation. Data and baselines for our shared task are freely available at https://github.com/vadis-project/sv-ident.

Exponential growth in the number of scientific publications yields the need for effective automatic analysis of rhetorical aspects of scientific writing. Acknowledging the argumentative nature of scientific text, in this work we investigate the link between the argumentative structure of scientific publications and rhetorical aspects such as discourse categories or citation contexts. To this end, we (1) augment a corpus of scientific publications annotated with four layers of rhetoric annotations with argumentation annotations and (2) investigate neural multi-task learning architectures combining argument extraction with a set of rhetorical classification tasks. By coupling rhetorical classifiers with the extraction of argumentative components in a joint multi-task learning setting, we obtain significant performance gains for different rhetorical analysis tasks.

Argumentation is arguably one of the central features of scientific language. We present ArguminSci, an easy-to-use tool that analyzes argumentation and other rhetorical aspects of scientific writing, which we collectively dub scitorics. The main aspect we focus on is the fine-grained argumentative analysis of scientific text through identification of argument components. The functionality of ArguminSci is accessible via three interfaces: as a command line tool, via a RESTful application programming interface, and as a web application.

Hypernymy relations (those where an hyponym term shares a “isa” relationship with his hypernym) play a key role for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, e.g. ontology learning, automatically building or extending knowledge bases, or word sense disambiguation and induction. In fact, such relations may provide the basis for the construction of more complex structures such as taxonomies, or be used as effective background knowledge for many word understanding applications. We present a publicly available database containing more than 400 million hypernymy relations we extracted from the CommonCrawl web corpus. We describe the infrastructure we developed to iterate over the web corpus for extracting the hypernymy relations and store them effectively into a large database. This collection of relations represents a rich source of knowledge and may be useful for many researchers. We offer the tuple dataset for public download and an Application Programming Interface (API) to help other researchers programmatically query the database.