The Search for Conflicts of Interest: Open Information Extraction in Scientific Publications

Garima Gaur, Oana Balalau, Ioana Manolescu, Prajna Upadhyay


Abstract
A conflict of interest (COI) appears when a person or a company has two or more interests that may directly conflict. This happens, for instance, when a scientist whose research is funded by a company audits the same company. For transparency and to avoid undue influence, public repositories of relations of interest are increasingly recommended or mandated in various domains, and can be used to avoid COIs. In this work, we propose an LLM-based open information extraction (OpenIE) framework for extracting financial or other types of interesting relations from scientific text. We target scientific publications in which authors declare funding sources or collaborations in the acknowledgment section, in the metadata, or in the publication, following editors’ requirements. We introduce an extraction methodology and present a knowledge base (KB) with a comprehensive taxonomy of COI centric relations. Finally, we perform a comparative study of disclosures of two journals in the field of toxicology and pharmacology.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.748
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13922–13936
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.748/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.748
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Garima Gaur, Oana Balalau, Ioana Manolescu, and Prajna Upadhyay. 2025. The Search for Conflicts of Interest: Open Information Extraction in Scientific Publications. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 13922–13936, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Search for Conflicts of Interest: Open Information Extraction in Scientific Publications (Gaur et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.748.pdf
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