DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field ( 15% annually), with an active and collaborative research community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers' abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.

Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and pre-finetuning for natural language understanding, few works have studied the effects of task families on abstractive text summarization. Task families are a form of task grouping during the pre-finetuning stage to learn common skills, such as reading comprehension. To close this gap, we analyze the influence of multi-task learning strategies using task families for the English abstractive text summarization task. We group tasks into one of three strategies, i.e., sequential, simultaneous, and continual multi-task learning, and evaluate trained models through two downstream tasks. We find that certain combinations of task families (e.g., advanced reading comprehension and natural language inference) positively impact downstream performance. Further, we find that choice and combinations of task families influence downstream performance more than the training scheme, supporting the use of task families for abstractive text summarization.

A drastic rise in potentially life-threatening misinformation has been a by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic. Computational support to identify false information within the massive body of data on the topic is crucial to prevent harm. Researchers proposed many methods for flagging online misinformation related to COVID-19. However, these methods predominantly target specific content types (e.g., news) or platforms (e.g., Twitter). The methods' capabilities to generalize were largely unclear so far. We evaluate fifteen Transformer-based models on five COVID-19 misinformation datasets that include social media posts, news articles, and scientific papers to fill this gap. We show tokenizers and models tailored to COVID-19 data do not provide a significant advantage over general-purpose ones. Our study provides a realistic assessment of models for detecting COVID-19 misinformation. We expect that evaluating a broad spectrum of datasets and models will benefit future research in developing misinformation detection systems.

We present two supervised (pre-)training methods to incorporate gloss definitions from lexical resources into neural language models (LMs). The training improves our models' performance for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) but also benefits general language understanding tasks while adding almost no parameters. We evaluate our techniques with seven different neural LMs and find that XLNet is more suitable for WSD than BERT. Our best-performing methods exceeds state-of-the-art WSD techniques on the SemCor 3.0 dataset by 0.5% F1 and increase BERT's performance on the GLUE benchmark by 1.1% on average.

The rise of language models such as BERT allows for high-quality text paraphrasing. This is a problem to academic integrity, as it is difficult to differentiate between original and machine-generated content. We propose a benchmark consisting of paraphrased articles using recent language models relying on the Transformer architecture. Our contribution fosters future research of paraphrase detection systems as it offers a large collection of aligned original and paraphrased documents, a study regarding its structure, classification experiments with state-of-the-art systems, and we make our findings publicly available.

Employing paraphrasing tools to conceal plagiarized text is a severe threat to academic integrity. To enable the detection of machine-paraphrased text, we evaluate the effectiveness of five pre-trained word embedding models combined with machine learning classifiers and state-of-the-art neural language models. We analyze preprints of research papers, graduation theses, and Wikipedia articles, which we paraphrased using different configurations of the tools SpinBot and SpinnerChief. The best performing technique, Longformer, achieved an average F1 score of 80.99% (F1=99.68% for SpinBot and F1=71.64% for SpinnerChief cases), while human evaluators achieved F1=78.4% for SpinBot and F1=65.6% for SpinnerChief cases. We show that the automated classification alleviates shortcomings of widely-used text-matching systems, such as Turnitin and PlagScan. To facilitate future research, all data, code, and two web applications showcasing our contributions are openly available.