---
library_name: transformers
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- SIRIS-Lab/erc-classification-dataset
base_model:
- allenai/specter2_base
pipeline_tag: text-classification
---

# ERC Panels Classifier

This model is a fine-tuned version of **allenai/specter2_base** for multilabel scientific domain classification aligned with **ERC panel taxonomy**.  
It achieves the following results on the held-out test set:

- **Best validation loss:** 0.0361  
- **Micro F1:** 0.9386  
- **Micro ROC-AUC:** 0.9718  
- **Subset accuracy:** 0.7943  

---

## Model description

This model is a fine-tuned variant of **SPECTER2** (`allenai/specter2_base`) adapted for **multilabel classification of scientific documents** into ERC research panels.

The model takes as input the **title and abstract** of a scientific publication and predicts **one or more research panels**.  
Since scientific outputs may legitimately span multiple domains, the model is trained using **sigmoid activation** with **binary cross-entropy loss**, allowing independent assignment of multiple labels.

### Key characteristics

- **Base model:** allenai/specter2_base  
- **Task:** multilabel document classification  
- **Labels:** 28 ERC scientific panels  
- **Activation:** sigmoid (independent scores per label)  
- **Loss:** BCEWithLogitsLoss  
- **Output:** list of predicted panels with associated probabilities  
- **Decision threshold:** 0.5 (tunable)

This model enables automatic research-domain tagging aligned with the ERC panel structure.

---

## Intended uses & limitations

### Intended uses

This model is designed for:

- Automatic assignment of ERC research panels  
- Metadata enrichment for:
  - research project databases  
  - institutional repositories  
  - funding and grant analysis pipelines  
- Large-scale analytics such as:
  - portfolio mapping  
  - thematic analysis of research outputs  
  - monitoring disciplinary coverage of funded projects  
- Predicting subject areas for documents lacking structured domain metadata  

The model supports:

- title only  
- abstract only  
- **title + abstract (recommended)**  

### Limitations

- ERC panels are **high-level categories** and do not represent fine-grained subdisciplines  
- Labels are derived from curated datasets, semi-automatically annotated data
- Class imbalance may affect recall for underrepresented panels  
- The model does not encode explicit hierarchical relationships between panels  

Not suited for:

- fine-grained subfield classification  
- journal recommendation  
- evaluation of research quality or impact  
- clinical, legal, or regulatory decision-making  

Predictions should be treated as **supportive metadata**, not authoritative classifications.

---

## How to use

```
from transformers import pipeline

# Replace with your actual model repo name on HuggingFace
MODEL_NAME = "nicolauduran45/erc_classifier_demo"

classifier = pipeline(task="text-classification", model=MODEL_NAME, tokenizer=MODEL_NAME)

text = ["Climate change impacts on Arctic ecosystems."]

classifier(text)
```
---

## Training and evaluation data

### Training data

- Scientific documents with ERC-style panel annotations  
- Inputs:
  - title  
  - abstract  
- Task type: **multilabel classification**

### Dataset characteristics

| Property | Value |
|--------|------|
| Documents | ~40k |
| Labels | 28 panels |
| Input fields | Title, Abstract |
| Task type | Multilabel |
| License | Dataset-dependent |

---

## Training procedure

### Preprocessing

- Input text constructed as:

  `title + ". " + abstract`

- Tokenization using the SPECTER2 tokenizer  
- Maximum sequence length: **512 tokens**

### Model

- Base model: `allenai/specter2_base`  
- Classification head: linear → sigmoid  
- Loss function: BCEWithLogitsLoss  
- Predictions: independent probability per label  

### Training hyperparameters

| Hyperparameter | Value |
|--------------|------|
| Learning rate | 2e-5 |
| Train batch size | 16 |
| Eval batch size | 16 |
| Epochs | 6 |
| Weight decay | 0.01 |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Metric for best model | Micro F1 |

---

## Training results

| Epoch | Training Loss | Validation Loss | Micro F1 | ROC-AUC | Accuracy |
|------|---------------|-----------------|----------|---------|----------|
| 1 | 0.2089 | 0.0968 | 0.7576 | 0.8347 | 0.4043 |
| 2 | 0.0961 | 0.0713 | 0.8231 | 0.8888 | 0.5171 |
| 3 | 0.0719 | 0.0578 | 0.8614 | 0.9209 | 0.5829 |
| 4 | 0.0579 | 0.0458 | 0.9072 | 0.9546 | 0.7029 |
| 5 | 0.0479 | 0.0390 | 0.9264 | 0.9620 | 0.7614 |
| 6 | 0.0407 | 0.0361 | **0.9386** | **0.9718** | **0.7943** |

---

## Evaluation results (multilabel test set)

| Panel | Precision | Recall | F1-score | Support |
|------|-----------|--------|----------|---------|
| Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering | 0.88 | 0.70 | 0.78 | 30 |
| Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and Regeneration | 0.98 | 0.94 | 0.96 | 54 |
| Computer Science and Informatics | 0.96 | 0.98 | 0.97 | 95 |
| Condensed Matter Physics | 0.97 | 0.99 | 0.98 | 68 |
| Earth System Science | 0.94 | 0.98 | 0.96 | 64 |
| Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution | 0.91 | 0.96 | 0.94 | 54 |
| Fundamental Constituents of Matter | 0.97 | 0.94 | 0.95 | 32 |
| Human Mobility, Environment, and Space | 0.81 | 0.81 | 0.81 | 21 |
| Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy | 1.00 | 0.97 | 0.99 | 40 |
| Individuals, Markets and Organisations | 0.94 | 0.98 | 0.96 | 48 |
| Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems | 0.89 | 0.92 | 0.91 | 26 |
| Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems | 0.91 | 0.98 | 0.94 | 49 |
| Materials Engineering | 0.81 | 0.93 | 0.87 | 75 |
| Mathematics | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 36 |
| Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions | 0.94 | 0.98 | 0.96 | 111 |
| Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 30 |
| Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences | 0.89 | 0.93 | 0.91 | 94 |
| Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing | 0.94 | 1.00 | 0.97 | 34 |
| Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases | 0.97 | 0.96 | 0.96 | 68 |
| Products and Processes Engineering | 0.90 | 0.97 | 0.93 | 109 |
| Studies of Cultures and Arts | 1.00 | 0.78 | 0.88 | 9 |
| Synthetic Chemistry and Materials | 0.82 | 0.77 | 0.79 | 47 |
| Systems and Communication Engineering | 0.94 | 0.97 | 0.95 | 87 |
| Texts and Concepts | 0.87 | 0.93 | 0.90 | 14 |
| The Human Mind and Its Complexity | 1.00 | 0.93 | 0.97 | 30 |
| The Social World and Its Interactions | 0.97 | 0.94 | 0.96 | 34 |
| The Study of the Human Past | 0.89 | 0.94 | 0.91 | 17 |
| Universe Sciences | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 25 |


**Overall performance**

|  | Precision | Recall | F1-score | Support |
|------|-----------|--------|----------|---------|
| **Micro avg** | **0.93** | **0.95** | **0.94** | **1401** |
| **Macro avg** | **0.93** | **0.94** | **0.93** | **1401** |
| **Weighted avg** | **0.93** | **0.95** | **0.94** | **1401** |
| **Samples avg** | **0.93** | **0.94** | **0.93** | **1401** |
  
---

## ERC-funded projects evaluation (multiclass recall)

This evaluation uses **ERC-funded projects**, where each project belongs to **exactly one panel**.  
Only **recall** is reported.

| Panel | Recall |
|------|--------|
| Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering | 0.26 |
| Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and Regeneration | 0.81 |
| Computer Science and Informatics | 1.00 |
| Condensed Matter Physics | 0.77 |
| Earth System Science | 0.92 |
| Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution | 0.85 |
| Fundamental Constituents of Matter | 0.84 |
| Human Mobility, Environment, and Space | 0.61 |
| Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy | 0.83 |
| Individuals, Markets and Organisations | 0.96 |
| Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems | 0.58 |
| Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems | 0.73 |
| Materials Engineering | 0.75 |
| Mathematics | 0.96 |
| Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions | 0.95 |
| Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System | 0.92 |
| Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences | 0.83 |
| Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing | 0.60 |
| Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases | 0.94 |
| Products and Processes Engineering | 0.58 |
| Studies of Cultures and Arts | 0.27 |
| Synthetic Chemistry and Materials | 0.67 |
| Systems and Communication Engineering | 0.75 |
| Texts and Concepts | 0.62 |
| The Human Mind and Its Complexity | 0.85 |
| The Social World and Its Interactions | 0.73 |
| The Study of the Human Past | 0.83 |
| Universe Sciences | 1.00 |

**Overall performance**
**Overall recall**

- **Micro recall:** 0.77  
- **Macro recall:** 0.76

## Citation

```
@inproceedings{bovenzi2022mapping,
  title={Mapping STI ecosystems via Open Data: Overcoming the limitations of conflicting taxonomies. A case study for Climate Change Research in Denmark},
  author={Bovenzi, Nicandro and Duran-Silva, Nicolau and Massucci, Francesco Alessandro and Multari, Francesco and Parra-Rojas, C{\'e}sar and Pujol-Llatse, Josep},
  booktitle={International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)},
  pages={495--499},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Springer International Publishing}
}
```

---

## Framework versions

- **Transformers:** 4.57.x  
- **PyTorch:** 2.8.0  
- **Datasets:** 3.x  
- **Tokenizers:** 0.22.x