arXiv subjects

Sören Auer

Publications and source records attributed to Sören Auer.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards AI-Supported Research: a Vision of the TIB AIssistant

The rapid advancements in Generative AI and Large Language Models promise to transform the way research is conducted, potentially offering unprecedented opportunities to augment scholarly workflows. However, effectively integrating AI into research remains a challenge due to varying domain requirements, limited AI literacy, the complexity of coordinating tools and agents, and the unclear accuracy of Generative AI in research. We present the vision of the TIB AIssistant, a domain-agnostic human-machine collaborative platform designed to support researchers across disciplines in scientific discovery, with AI assistants supporting tasks across the research life cycle. The platform offers modular components - including prompt and tool libraries, a shared data store, and a flexible orchestration framework - that collectively facilitate ideation, literature analysis, methodology development, data analysis, and scholarly writing. We describe the conceptual framework, system architecture, and implementation of an early prototype that demonstrates the feasibility and potential impact of our approach.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Introducing ORKG ASK: an AI-driven Scholarly Literature Search and Exploration System Taking a Neuro-Symbolic Approach

As the volume of published scholarly literature continues to grow, finding relevant literature becomes increasingly difficult. With the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), new possibilities emerge to find and explore literature. We introduce ASK (Assistant for Scientific Knowledge), an AI-driven scholarly literature search and exploration system that follows a neuro-symbolic approach. ASK aims to provide active support to researchers in finding relevant scholarly literature by leveraging vector search, LLMs, and knowledge graphs. The system allows users to input research questions in natural language and retrieve relevant articles. ASK automatically extracts key information and generates answers to research questions using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. We present an evaluation of ASK, assessing the system's usability and usefulness. Findings indicate that the system is user-friendly and users are generally satisfied while using the system.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries through Unit Harmonisation in Scholarly Knowledge Graphs

Scientists have always used the studies and research of other researchers to achieve new objectives and perspectives. In particular, employing and operating the measured data in previous studies is so practical. Searching the content of other scientists' articles is a challenge that researchers have always struggled with. Nowadays, the use of knowledge graphs as a semantic database has helped a lot in saving and retrieving scholarly knowledge. Such technologies are crucial to upgrading traditional search systems to smart knowledge retrieval, which is crucial to getting the most relevant answers for a user query, especially in information and knowledge management. However, in most cases, only the metadata of a paper is searchable, and it is still cumbersome for scientists to have access to the content of the papers. In this paper, we present a novel method of faceted search \emph{structured content} for comparing and filtering measured data in scholarly knowledge graphs while different units of measurement are used in different studies. This search system proposes applicable units as facets to the user and would dynamically integrate content from further remote knowledge graphs to materialize the scholarly knowledge graph and achieve a higher order of exploration usability on scholarly content, which can be filtered to better satisfy the user's information needs. The state of the art is that, by using our faceted search system, users can not only search the contents of scientific articles, but also compare and filter heterogeneous data.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Computational Fact-Checking of Online Discourse: Scoring scientific accuracy in climate change related news articles

Democratic societies need reliable information. Misinformation in popular media, such as news articles or videos, threatens to impair civic discourse. Citizens are, unfortunately, not equipped to verify the flood of content consumed daily at increasing rates. This work aims to quantify the scientific accuracy of online media semi-automatically. We investigate the state of the art of climate-related ground truth knowledge representation. By semantifying media content of unknown veracity, their statements can be compared against these ground truth knowledge graphs. We implemented a workflow using LLM-based statement extraction and knowledge graph analysis. Our implementation can streamline content processing towards state-of-the-art knowledge representation and veracity quantification. Developed and evaluated with the help of 27 experts and detailed interviews with 10, the tool evidently provides a beneficial veracity indication. These findings are supported by 43 anonymous participants from a parallel user survey. This initial step, however, is unable to annotate public media at the required granularity and scale. Additionally, the identified state of climate change knowledge graphs is vastly insufficient to support this neurosymbolic fact-checking approach. Further work towards a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ground truth and complementary metrics is required to support civic discourse scientifically.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SciCom Wiki: A Digital Library to Support the Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure for Videos and Podcasts

Videos and Podcasts have established themselves as the medium of choice for civic dissemination, but also as carriers of misinformation. The emerging Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure (SciCom KI), which curates these increasingly non-textual media, remains fragmented and inadequately equipped to scale against the content flood. Our work sets out to support the SciCom KI with a central, collaborative platform, the SciCom Wiki, to facilitate FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) media representation, particularly for videos and podcasts. We survey requirements from 53 stakeholders and individually refine these insights in 11 interviews. We then design and implement an open-source service system centered on Wikibase and evaluate our prototype with another 14 participants. Overall, our findings identified several needs to support the SciCom KI systematically. Our SciCom Wiki approach was found suitable to address the raised requirements. Further, we identified that the SciCom KI is severely underdeveloped regarding FAIR knowledge and related systems facilitating its collaborative creation and curation. Our system can provide a central knowledge node similar to Wikidata, yet a collaborative effort is required to scale the necessary features against the imminent (mis-)information flood.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

OntoAligner Meets Knowledge Graph Embedding Aligners

Ontology Alignment (OA) is essential for enabling semantic interoperability across heterogeneous knowledge systems. While recent advances have focused on large language models (LLMs) for capturing contextual semantics, this work revisits the underexplored potential of Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models, which offer scalable, structure-aware representations well-suited to ontology-based tasks. Despite their effectiveness in link prediction, KGE methods remain underutilized in OA, with most prior work focusing narrowly on a few models. To address this gap, we reformulate OA as a link prediction problem over merged ontologies represented as RDF-style triples and develop a modular framework, integrated into the OntoAligner library, that supports 17 diverse KGE models. The system learns embeddings from a combined ontology and aligns entities by computing cosine similarity between their representations. We evaluate our approach using standard metrics across seven benchmark datasets spanning five domains: Anatomy, Biodiversity, Circular Economy, Material Science and Engineering, and Biomedical Machine Learning. Two key findings emerge: first, KGE models like ConvE and TransF consistently produce high-precision alignments, outperforming traditional systems in structure-rich and multi-relational domains; second, while their recall is moderate, this conservatism makes KGEs well-suited for scenarios demanding high-confidence mappings. Unlike LLM-based methods that excel at contextual reasoning, KGEs directly preserve and exploit ontology structure, offering a complementary and computationally efficient strategy. These results highlight the promise of embedding-based OA and open pathways for further work on hybrid models and adaptive strategies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ExtracTable: Human-in-the-Loop Transformation of Scientific Corpora into Structured Knowledge

As the volume of scientific literature grows, efficient knowledge organization becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional approaches to structuring scientific content are time-consuming and require significant domain expertise, highlighting the need for tool support. We present ExtracTable, a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) workflow and framework that assists researchers in transforming unstructured publications into structured representations. The workflow combines large language models (LLMs) with user-defined schemas and is designed for downstream integration into knowledge graphs (KGs). Developed and evaluated in the context of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), ExtracTable automates key steps such as document preprocessing and data extraction while ensuring user oversight through validation. In an evaluation with ORKG community participants following the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP), ExtracTable demonstrated high usability and practical value. Participants gave it an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 84.17 (A+, the highest rating). The time to progress from a research interest to literature-based insights was reduced from between 4 hours and 2 weeks to an average of 24:40 minutes. By streamlining corpus creation and structured data extraction for knowledge graph integration, ExtracTable leverages LLMs and user models to accelerate literature reviews. However, human validation remains essential to ensure quality, and future work will address improving extraction accuracy and entity linking to existing knowledge resources.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Managing Comprehensive Research Instrument Descriptions within a Scholarly Knowledge Graph

In research, measuring instruments play a crucial role in producing the data that underpin scientific discoveries. Information about instruments is essential in data interpretation and, thus, knowledge production. However, if at all available and accessible, such information is scattered across numerous data sources. Relating the relevant details, e.g. instrument specifications or calibrations, with associated research assets (data, but also operating infrastructures) is challenging. Moreover, understanding the (possible) use of instruments is essential for researchers in experiment design and execution. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Graph (KG) based approach for representing, publishing, and using information, extracted from various data sources, about instruments and associated scholarly artefacts. The resulting KG serves as a foundation for exploring and gaining a deeper understanding of the use and role of instruments in research, discovering relations between instruments and associated artefacts (articles and datasets), and opens the possibility to quantify the impact of instruments in research.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Research Knowledge Graphs: the Shifting Paradigm of Scholarly Information Representation

Sharing and reusing research artifacts, such as datasets, publications, or methods is a fundamental part of scientific activity, where heterogeneity of resources and metadata and the common practice of capturing information in unstructured publications pose crucial challenges. Reproducibility of research and finding state-of-the-art methods or data have become increasingly challenging. In this context, the concept of Research Knowledge Graphs (RKGs) has emerged, aiming at providing an easy to use and machine-actionable representation of research artifacts and their relations. That is facilitated through the use of established principles for data representation, the consistent adoption of globally unique persistent identifiers and the reuse and linking of vocabularies and data. This paper provides the first conceptualisation of the RKG vision, a categorisation of in-use RKGs together with a description of RKG building blocks and principles. We also survey real-world RKG implementations differing with respect to scale, schema, data, used vocabulary, and reliability of the contained data. We also characterise different RKG construction methodologies and provide a forward-looking perspective on the diverse applications, opportunities, and challenges associated with the RKG vision.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

MC-NEST: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models leveraging a Monte Carlo Self-Refine Tree

Mathematical reasoning presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). To enhance their capabilities, we propose Monte Carlo Self-Refine Tree (MC-NEST), an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search that integrates LLM-based self-refinement and self-evaluation for improved decision-making in complex reasoning tasks. MC-NEST balances exploration and exploitation using Upper Confidence Bound (UCT) scores combined with diverse selection policies. Through iterative critique and refinement, LLMs learn to reason more strategically. Empirical results demonstrate that MC-NEST with an importance sampling policy substantially improves GPT-4o's performance, achieving state-of-the-art pass@1 scores on Olympiad-level benchmarks. Specifically, MC-NEST attains a pass@1 of 38.6 on AIME and 12.6 on MathOdyssey. The solution quality for MC-NEST using GPT-4o and Phi-3-mini reaches 84.0\% and 82.08\%, respectively, indicating robust consistency across different LLMs. MC-NEST performs strongly across Algebra, Geometry, and Number Theory, benefiting from its ability to handle abstraction, logical deduction, and multi-step reasoning -- core skills in mathematical problem solving.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

EmoNet-Face: An Expert-Annotated Benchmark for Synthetic Emotion Recognition

Effective human-AI interaction relies on AI's ability to accurately perceive and interpret human emotions. Current benchmarks for vision and vision-language models are severely limited, offering a narrow emotional spectrum that overlooks nuanced states (e.g., bitterness, intoxication) and fails to distinguish subtle differences between related feelings (e.g., shame vs. embarrassment). Existing datasets also often use uncontrolled imagery with occluded faces and lack demographic diversity, risking significant bias. To address these critical gaps, we introduce EmoNet Face, a comprehensive benchmark suite. EmoNet Face features: (1) A novel 40-category emotion taxonomy, meticulously derived from foundational research to capture finer details of human emotional experiences. (2) Three large-scale, AI-generated datasets (EmoNet HQ, Binary, and Big) with explicit, full-face expressions and controlled demographic balance across ethnicity, age, and gender. (3) Rigorous, multi-expert annotations for training and high-fidelity evaluation. (4) We built EmpathicInsight-Face, a model achieving human-expert-level performance on our benchmark. The publicly released EmoNet Face suite - taxonomy, datasets, and model - provides a robust foundation for developing and evaluating AI systems with a deeper understanding of human emotions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Knowledge-Based Aerospace Engineering -- A Systematic Literature Review

The aerospace industry operates at the frontier of technological innovation while maintaining high standards regarding safety and reliability. In this environment, with an enormous potential for re-use and adaptation of existing solutions and methods, Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) has been applied for decades. The objective of this study is to identify and examine state-of-the-art knowledge management practices in the field of aerospace engineering. Our contributions include: 1) A SWARM-SLR of over 1,000 articles with qualitative analysis of 164 selected articles, supported by two aerospace engineering domain expert surveys. 2) A knowledge graph of over 700 knowledge-based aerospace engineering processes, software, and data, formalized in the interoperable Web Ontology Language (OWL) and mapped to Wikidata entries where possible. The knowledge graph is represented on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), and an aerospace Wikibase, for reuse and continuation of structuring aerospace engineering knowledge exchange. 3) Our resulting intermediate and final artifacts of the knowledge synthesis, available as a Zenodo dataset. This review sets a precedent for structured, semantic-based approaches to managing aerospace engineering knowledge. By advancing these principles, research, and industry can achieve more efficient design processes, enhanced collaboration, and a stronger commitment to sustainable aviation.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

SciCom Wiki: Fact-Checking and FAIR Knowledge Distribution for Scientific Videos and Podcasts

Democratic societies need accessible, reliable information. Videos and Podcasts have established themselves as the medium of choice for civic dissemination, but also as carriers of misinformation. The emerging Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure (SciCom KI) curating non-textual media is still fragmented and not adequately equipped to scale against the content flood. Our work sets out to support the SciCom KI with a central, collaborative platform, the SciCom Wiki, to facilitate FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) media representation and the fact-checking of their content, particularly for videos and podcasts. Building an open-source service system centered around Wikibase, we survey requirements from 53 stakeholders, refine these in 11 interviews, and evaluate our prototype based on these requirements with another 14 participants. To address the most requested feature, fact-checking, we developed a neurosymbolic computational fact-checking approach, converting heterogenous media into knowledge graphs. This increases machine-readability and allows comparing statements against equally represented ground-truth. Our computational fact-checking tool was iteratively evaluated through 10 expert interviews, a public user survey with 43 participants verified the necessity and usability of our tool. Overall, our findings identified several needs to systematically support the SciCom KI. The SciCom Wiki, as a FAIR digital library complementing our neurosymbolic computational fact-checking framework, was found suitable to address the raised requirements. Further, we identified that the SciCom KI is severely underdeveloped regarding FAIR knowledge and related systems facilitating its collaborative creation and curation. Our system can provide a central knowledge node, yet a collaborative effort is required to scale against the imminent (mis-)information flood.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Project Alexandria: Towards Freeing Scientific Knowledge from Copyright Burdens via LLMs

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We propose a new idea for the community to adopt: convert scholarly documents into knowledge preserving, but style agnostic representations we term Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95\%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SciMantify -- A Hybrid Approach for the Evolving Semantification of Scientific Knowledge

Scientific publications, primarily digitized as PDFs, remain static and unstructured, limiting the accessibility and reusability of the contained knowledge. At best, scientific knowledge from publications is provided in tabular formats, which lack semantic context. A more flexible, structured, and semantic representation is needed to make scientific knowledge understandable and processable by both humans and machines. We propose an evolution model of knowledge representation, inspired by the 5-star Linked Open Data (LOD) model, with five stages and defined criteria to guide the stepwise transition from a digital artifact, such as a PDF, to a semantic representation integrated in a knowledge graph (KG). Based on an exemplary workflow implementing the entire model, we developed a hybrid approach, called SciMantify, leveraging tabular formats of scientific knowledge, e.g., results from secondary studies, to support its evolving semantification. In the approach, humans and machines collaborate closely by performing semantic annotation tasks (SATs) and refining the results to progressively improve the semantic representation of scientific knowledge. We implemented the approach in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), an established platform for improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scientific knowledge. A preliminary user experiment showed that the approach simplifies the preprocessing of scientific knowledge, reduces the effort for the evolving semantification, and enhances the knowledge representation through better alignment with the KG structures.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

LLMs4SchemaDiscovery: A Human-in-the-Loop Workflow for Scientific Schema Mining with Large Language Models

Extracting structured information from unstructured text is crucial for modeling real-world processes, but traditional schema mining relies on semi-structured data, limiting scalability. This paper introduces schema-miner, a novel tool that combines large language models with human feedback to automate and refine schema extraction. Through an iterative workflow, it organizes properties from text, incorporates expert input, and integrates domain-specific ontologies for semantic depth. Applied to materials science--specifically atomic layer deposition--schema-miner demonstrates that expert-guided LLMs generate semantically rich schemas suitable for diverse real-world applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

OntoAligner: A Comprehensive Modular and Robust Python Toolkit for Ontology Alignment

Ontology Alignment (OA) is fundamental for achieving semantic interoperability across diverse knowledge systems. We present OntoAligner, a comprehensive, modular, and robust Python toolkit for ontology alignment, designed to address current limitations with existing tools faced by practitioners. Existing tools are limited in scalability, modularity, and ease of integration with recent AI advances. OntoAligner provides a flexible architecture integrating existing lightweight OA techniques such as fuzzy matching but goes beyond by supporting contemporary methods with retrieval-augmented generation and large language models for OA. The framework prioritizes extensibility, enabling researchers to integrate custom alignment algorithms and datasets. This paper details the design principles, architecture, and implementation of the OntoAligner, demonstrating its utility through benchmarks on standard OA tasks. Our evaluation highlights OntoAligner's ability to handle large-scale ontologies efficiently with few lines of code while delivering high alignment quality. By making OntoAligner open-source, we aim to provide a resource that fosters innovation and collaboration within the OA community, empowering researchers and practitioners with a toolkit for reproducible OA research and real-world applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

SCI-IDEA: Context-Aware Scientific Ideation Using Token and Sentence Embeddings

Every scientific discovery starts with an idea inspired by prior work, interdisciplinary concepts, and emerging challenges. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) trained on scientific corpora have driven interest in AI-supported idea generation. However, generating context-aware, high-quality, and innovative ideas remains challenging. We introduce SCI-IDEA, a framework that uses LLM prompting strategies and Aha Moment detection for iterative idea refinement. SCI-IDEA extracts essential facets from research publications, assessing generated ideas on novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness. Comprehensive experiments validate SCI-IDEA's effectiveness, achieving average scores of 6.84, 6.86, 6.89, and 6.84 (on a 1-10 scale) across novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness, respectively. Evaluations employed GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, DeepSeek-32B (each under 2-shot prompting), and DeepSeek-70B (3-shot prompting), with token-level embeddings used for Aha Moment detection. Similarly, it achieves scores of 6.87, 6.86, 6.83, and 6.87 using GPT-4o under 5-shot prompting, GPT-4.5 under 3-shot prompting, DeepSeek-32B under zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, and DeepSeek-70B under 5-shot prompting with sentence-level embeddings. We also address ethical considerations such as intellectual credit, potential misuse, and balancing human creativity with AI-driven ideation. Our results highlight SCI-IDEA's potential to facilitate the structured and flexible exploration of context-aware scientific ideas, supporting innovation while maintaining ethical standards.

cs.CL↗