In this work, we present a collaboratively and continuously developed open-source educational resource (OSER) for teaching natural language processing at two different universities. We shed light on the principles we followed for the initial design of the course and the rationale for ongoing developments, followed by a reflection on the inter-university collaboration for designing and maintaining teaching material. When reflecting on the latter, we explicitly emphasize the considerations that need to be made when facing heterogeneous groups and when having to accommodate multiple examination regulations within one single course framework. Relying on the fundamental principles of OSER developments as defined by Bothmann et al. (2023) proved to be an important guideline during this process. The final part pertains to open-sourcing our teaching material, coping with the increasing speed of developments in the field, and integrating the course digitally, also addressing conflicting priorities and challenges we are currently facing.

Recent developments in sequence-to-sequence learning with neural networks have considerably improved the quality of automatically generated text summaries and document keywords, stipulating the need for even bigger training corpora. Metadata of research articles are usually easy to find online and can be used to perform research on various tasks. In this paper, we introduce two huge datasets for text summarization (OAGSX) and keyword generation (OAGKX) research, containing 34 million and 23 million records, respectively. The data were retrieved from the Open Academic Graph which is a network of research profiles and publications. We carefully processed each record and also tried several extractive and abstractive methods of both tasks to create performance baselines for other researchers. We further illustrate the performance of those methods previewing their outputs. In the near future, we would like to apply topic modeling on the two sets to derive subsets of research articles from more specific disciplines.

Authors’ keyphrases assigned to scientific articles are essential for recognizing content and topic aspects. Most of the proposed supervised and unsupervised methods for keyphrase generation are unable to produce terms that are valuable but do not appear in the text. In this paper, we explore the possibility of considering the keyphrase string as an abstractive summary of the title and the abstract. First, we collect, process and release a large dataset of scientific paper metadata that contains 2.2 million records. Then we experiment with popular text summarization neural architectures. Despite using advanced deep learning models, large quantities of data and many days of computation, our systematic evaluation on four test datasets reveals that the explored text summarization methods could not produce better keyphrases than the simpler unsupervised methods, or the existing supervised ones.

Using data-driven models for solving text summarization or similar tasks has become very common in the last years. Yet most of the studies report basic accuracy scores only, and nothing is known about the ability of the proposed models to improve when trained on more data. In this paper, we define and propose three data efficiency metrics: data score efficiency, data time deficiency and overall data efficiency. We also propose a simple scheme that uses those metrics and apply it for a more comprehensive evaluation of popular methods on text summarization and title generation tasks. For the latter task, we process and release a huge collection of 35 million abstract-title pairs from scientific articles. Our results reveal that among the tested models, the Transformer is the most efficient on both tasks.