Leveraging Large Language Models for Generating Research Topic Ontologies: A Multi-Disciplinary Study 文章

arXiv:2508.20693v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ontologies and taxonomies of research fields are critical for managing and organising scientific knowledge, as they facilitate efficient classification, dissemination and retrieval of information. However, the creation and maintenance of such ontologies are expensive and time-consuming tasks, usually requiring the coordinated effort of multiple domain experts. Consequently, ontologies in this space often exhibit uneven coverage across different disciplines, limited inter-discipline connectivity, and infrequent updating cycles. In this study, we investigate the capability of several large language models to identify semantic relationships among research topics within three academic disciplines: biomedicine, physics, and engineering. The models were evaluated under three distinct conditions: zero-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and fine-tuning on existing ontologies.