arXiv subjects

Luca Foppiano

Publications and source records attributed to Luca Foppiano.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Counting Documents Is Not Counting Text: Unit Bias in Web-PDF Corpus Statistics

PDF corpora advertise their size in tokens but compute every rate they publish (coverage, OCR routing, re-fetch recovery, language mix) per document, and none decomposes its token total. The two units diverge sharply. On CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED (7.9M web PDFs, 32.6B tokens), 3.02% of text-bearing documents hold half the tokens (Gini 0.807); documents over 50 pages are 5.00% of the corpus but 53.53% of its text. The PDFs produced by a TeX{} toolchain are 1.66% of documents and 4.05% of the text. The clearest casualty is Common Crawl's truncation cap: it affected 23.06% of documents and 63.08% of the text. Reconstructing the truncated files and extracting both versions, two widely used libraries recover 11.4% and 1.4% of that text; between 72% and 97% of affected documents yield nothing; roughly 55--62% of the corpus's text is lost. Under the 5 MiB cap adopted in March 2025, 30.19% of tokens would still be truncated, and recovery on those documents rises only from 3.3% to 13.2%. We recommend that corpus statistics be reported in both units: documents and tokens.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Measuring What the Crawler Sees: Discovery Curves, Core Persistence, and Shell Dynamics in Longitudinal Web Crawls

A longitudinal web crawl is a sequence of partial samples of an evolving URL population. Pairwise containment between two crawls is the standard probe; under a simple \emph{urn} model of the crawl -- each round samples a fraction of the URLs and replaces a fraction -- it recovers two interpretable rates, per-round survival $\alpha$ and coverage $c$, but treats the population as uniform and consumes one pair at a time. In this work, we define a formal language for talking about a crawl. We extend this analysis with the \emph{discovery curve} $U(s, T)$, the cumulative URL footprint over a sliding window of $T$ crawls starting at $s$, which under the same urn model is also a closed-form function of $(\alpha, c)$. Containment and the discovery curve are then two projections of one process: independent fits agree on $(\alpha, c)$ when the urn is homogeneous, so any disagreement is itself a measurement. Applied to Common Crawl (2020--2025, domain granularity) and to the German Academic Web (GAW, URL granularity), the two projections disagree on both archives, and a two-component urn with a persistent core fraction $\kappa$ alongside shell parameters $(\alpha_\partial, c_\partial)$ reconciles the disagreement. A residual on $c_\partial$ remains, signaling that the shell itself is not homogeneous; $\kappa$ is recorded as the scalar entry point to a rank-resolved generalization, which is left to follow-up work. \keywords{web archive \and crawl coverage \and discovery curve \and urn model \and two-component model \and URL lifetime}

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

The INRIA DataLake: A Generic and Scalable Ecosystem of Pipelines for HAL Applied to Software Mentions Tracking

Research repositories contain a large amount of scientific knowledge, but access to structured articles and specialised information, such as datasets or software metadata, remains limited. In this paper, we present the INRIA DataLake project, which provides an ecosystem of scalable and interconnected pipelines for preparing scientific literature, extracting structured information, and applying specialised treatments. Using a large-scale shared infrastructure, Grid'5000/ABACA, we demonstrate our ecosystem through a concrete use case: extracting software mentions from scientific articles deposited daily and visualising them after validation in the HAL research portal. Our results show that the system can efficiently process large volumes of scientific literature while supporting user validation and interoperability with external systems. Designed to grow by integrating additional pipelines and sharing the preparation effort across research groups, this project already contributes to open science through improved visibility and tracking of research software.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Digging Up Citations: FOSSIL, a Dataset and Workflow for Reference Extraction in Law and the Humanities

Citation extraction tools are designed for the structured end-of-document bibliographies of the natural sciences, but law and humanities scholarship cites references primarily in footnotes, where bibliographic data is interleaved with commentary and cross-references and varies widely across languages and styles. To address the scarcity of suitable gold-standard resources, we present FOSSIL (Footnote-based Open-access SSH Scientific Instance Labels), an openly licensed multilingual dataset of 96 annotated scholarly articles containing over 7,600 footnote-embedded references, together with PDF-TEI Editor (a collaborative web annotation tool), a documented seven-annotator workflow, and a Grobid specialization for footnote-based citations. In end-to-end evaluation, the specialized pipeline nearly doubles extraction quality over default Grobid (micro-F1 from 0.36 to 0.72), driven largely by improved recall, while showing that substantial headroom remains for cross-references and mixed-content footnotes. This extended abstract presents work in progress; annotations of citations segmentation and parsing, and cross-reference resolution are ongoing.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Construction of a Battery Research Knowledge Graph using a Global Open Catalog

Battery research is a rapidly growing and highly interdisciplinary field, making it increasingly difficult to track relevant expertise and identify potential collaborators across institutional boundaries. In this work, we present a pipeline for constructing an author-centric knowledge graph of battery research built on OpenAlex, a large-scale open bibliographic catalogue. For each author, we derive a weighted research descriptors vector that combines coarse-grained OpenAlex concepts with fine-grained keyphrases extracted from titles and abstracts using KeyBERT with ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) as the backend model, selected after evaluating multiple alternatives. Vector components are weighted by research descriptor origin, authorship position, and temporal recency. The framework is applied to a corpus of 189,581 battery-related works. The resulting vectors support author-author similarity computation, community detection, and exploratory search through a browser-based interface. The knowledge graph is then serialized in RDF and linked to Wikidata identifiers, making it interoperable with external linked open data sources and extensible beyond the battery domain. Unlike prior author-centric analyses confined to institutional repositories, our approach operates at cross-institutional scale and grounds similarity in domain semantics rather than citation or co-authorship structure alone.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data often used to train multilingual language models. In this paper, we introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. Many of the included languages have been previously under-served, making CommonLID a key resource for developing more representative high-quality text corpora. We show CommonLID's value by using it, alongside five other common evaluation sets, to test eight popular LID models. We analyse our results to situate our contribution and to provide an overview of the state of the art. In particular, we highlight that existing evaluations overestimate LID accuracy for many languages in the web domain. We make CommonLID and the code used to create it available under an open, permissive license.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SciLaD: A Large-Scale, Transparent, Reproducible Dataset for Natural Scientific Language Processing

SciLaD is a novel, large-scale dataset of scientific language constructed entirely using open-source frameworks and publicly available data sources. It comprises a curated English split containing over 10 million scientific publications and a multilingual, unfiltered TEI XML split including more than 35 million publications. We also publish the extensible pipeline for generating SciLaD. The dataset construction and processing workflow demonstrates how open-source tools can enable large-scale, scientific data curation while maintaining high data quality. Finally, we pre-train a RoBERTa model on our dataset and evaluate it across a comprehensive set of benchmarks, achieving performance comparable to other scientific language models of similar size, validating the quality and utility of SciLaD. We publish the dataset and evaluation pipeline to promote reproducibility, transparency, and further research in natural scientific language processing and understanding, including scholarly document processing.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Mining experimental data from Materials Science literature with Large Language Models: an evaluation study

This study is dedicated to assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Turbo in extracting structured information from scientific documents in materials science. To this end, we primarily focus on two critical tasks of information extraction: (i) a named entity recognition (NER) of studied materials and physical properties and (ii) a relation extraction (RE) between these entities. Due to the evident lack of datasets within Materials Informatics (MI), we evaluated using SuperMat, based on superconductor research, and MeasEval, a generic measurement evaluation corpus. The performance of LLMs in executing these tasks is benchmarked against traditional models based on the BERT architecture and rule-based approaches (baseline). We introduce a novel methodology for the comparative analysis of intricate material expressions, emphasising the standardisation of chemical formulas to tackle the complexities inherent in materials science information assessment. For NER, LLMs fail to outperform the baseline with zero-shot prompting and exhibit only limited improvement with few-shot prompting. However, a GPT-3.5-Turbo fine-tuned with the appropriate strategy for RE outperforms all models, including the baseline. Without any fine-tuning, GPT-4 and GPT-4-Turbo display remarkable reasoning and relationship extraction capabilities after being provided with merely a couple of examples, surpassing the baseline. Overall, the results suggest that although LLMs demonstrate relevant reasoning skills in connecting concepts, specialised models are currently a better choice for tasks requiring extracting complex domain-specific entities like materials. These insights provide initial guidance applicable to other materials science sub-domains in future work.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Semi-automatic staging area for high-quality structured data extraction from scientific literature

We propose a semi-automatic staging area for efficiently building an accurate database of experimental physical properties of superconductors from literature, called SuperCon2, to enrich the existing manually-built superconductor database SuperCon. Here we report our curation interface (SuperCon2 Interface) and a workflow managing the state transitions of each examined record, to validate the dataset of superconductors from PDF documents collected using Grobid-superconductors in a previous work. This curation workflow allows both automatic and manual operations, the former contains ``anomaly detection'' that scans new data identifying outliers, and a ``training data collector'' mechanism that collects training data examples based on manual corrections. Such training data collection policy is effective in improving the machine-learning models with a reduced number of examples. For manual operations, the interface (SuperCon2 interface) is developed to increase efficiency during manual correction by providing a smart interface and an enhanced PDF document viewer. We show that our interface significantly improves the curation quality by boosting precision and recall as compared with the traditional ``manual correction''. Our semi-automatic approach would provide a solution for achieving a reliable database with text-data mining of scientific documents.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Automatic extraction of materials and properties from superconductors scientific literature

The automatic extraction of materials and related properties from the scientific literature is gaining attention in data-driven materials science (Materials Informatics). In this paper, we discuss Grobid-superconductors, our solution for automatically extracting superconductor material names and respective properties from text. Built as a Grobid module, it combines machine learning and heuristic approaches in a multi-step architecture that supports input data as raw text or PDF documents. Using Grobid-superconductors, we built SuperCon2, a database of 40324 materials and properties records from 37700 papers. The material (or sample) information is represented by name, chemical formula, and material class, and is characterized by shape, doping, substitution variables for components, and substrate as adjoined information. The properties include the Tc superconducting critical temperature and, when available, applied pressure with the Tc measurement method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

SuperMat: Construction of a linked annotated dataset from superconductors-related publications

A growing number of papers are published in the area of superconducting materials science. However, novel text and data mining (TDM) processes are still needed to efficiently access and exploit this accumulated knowledge, paving the way towards data-driven materials design. Herein, we present SuperMat (Superconductor Materials), an annotated corpus of linked data derived from scientific publications on superconductors, which comprises 142 articles, 16052 entities, and 1398 links that are characterised into six categories: the names, classes, and properties of materials; links to their respective superconducting critical temperature (Tc); and parametric conditions such as applied pressure or measurement methods. The construction of SuperMat resulted from a fruitful collaboration between computer scientists and material scientists, and its high quality is ensured through validation by domain experts. The quality of the annotation guidelines was ensured by satisfactory Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) between the annotators and the domain experts. SuperMat includes the dataset, annotation guidelines, and annotation support tools that use automatic suggestions to help minimise human errors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗