Improving astroBERT using Semantic Textual Similarity

Abstract: The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an essential tool for researchers that allows them to explore the astronomy and astrophysics scientific literature, but it has yet to exploit recent advances in natural language processing. At ADASS 2021, we introduced astroBERT, a machine learning LLM tailored to the text used in astronomy papers in ADS. In this work we: - announce the first public release of the astroBERT LLM; - show how astroBERT improves over existing public LLMs on astrophysics specific tasks; - and detail how ADS plans to harness the unique structure of scientific papers, the citation graph and citation context, to further improve astroBERT.