A Centrality-Weighted Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers Model for Enhanced Sequence Labeling in Key Phrase Extraction from Scientific Texts

Deep learning approaches, utilizing Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and advanced fine-tuning techniques, have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies in the domain of term extraction from texts. However, BERT presents some limitations in that it primarily captures the semantic context relative to the surrounding text without considering how relevant or central a token is to the overall document content. There has also been research on the application of sequence labeling on contextualized embeddings; however, the existing methods often rely solely on local context for extracting key phrases from texts. To address these limitations, this study proposes a centrality-weighted BERT model for key phrase extraction from text using sequence labelling (CenBERT-SEQ). The proposed CenBERT-SEQ model utilizes BERT to represent terms with various contextual embedding architectures, and introduces a centrality-weighting layer that integrates document-level context into BERT. This layer leverages document embeddings to influence the importance of each term based on its relevance to the entire document. Finally, a linear classifier layer is employed to model the dependencies between the outputs, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the CenBERT-SEQ model. The proposed CenBERT-SEQ model was evaluated against the standard BERT base-uncased model using three Computer Science article datasets, namely, SemEval-2010, WWW, and KDD. The experimental results show that, although the CenBERT-SEQ and BERT-base models achieved higher and close comparable accuracy, the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model achieved higher precision, recall, and F1-score than the BERT-base model. Furthermore, a comparison of the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model to that of related studies revealed that the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model achieved a higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 95%, 97%, 91%, and 94%, respectively, than related studies, showing the superior capabilities of the CenBERT-SEQ model in keyphrase extraction from scientific documents.