Building an annotated corpus for automatic metadata extraction from multilingual journal article references

Bibliographic references containing citation information of academic literature play an important role as a medium connecting earlier and recent studies. As references contain machine-readable metadata such as author name, title, or publication year, they have been widely used in the field of citation information services including search services for scholarly information and research trend analysis. Many institutions around the world manually extract and continuously accumulate reference metadata to provide various scholarly services. However, manually collection of reference metadata every year continues to be a burden because of the associated cost and time consumption. With the accumulation of a large volume of academic literature, several tools, including GROBID and CERMINE, that automatically extract reference metadata have been released. However, these tools have some limitations. For example, they are only applicable to references written in English, the types of extractable metadata are limited for each tool, and the performance of the tools is insufficient to replace the manual extraction of reference metadata. Therefore, in this study, we focused on constructing a high-quality corpus to automatically extract metadata from multilingual journal article references. Using our constructed corpus, we trained and evaluated a BERT-based transfer-learning model. Furthermore, we compared the performance of the BERT-based model with that of the existing model, GROBID. Currently, our corpus contains 3,815,987 multilingual references, mainly in English and Korean, with labels for 13 different metadata types. According to our experiment, the BERT-based model trained using our corpus showed excellent performance in extracting metadata not only from journal references written in English but also in other languages, particularly Korean. This corpus is available at http://doi.org/10.23057/47.