Papers › SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text

SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text

26 Mar 2019IJCNLP 2019 11arXiv:1903.10676archive 2025-07-28

Iz Beltagy, Kyle Lo, Arman Cohan

Obtaining large-scale annotated data for NLP tasks in the scientific domain is challenging and expensive. We release SciBERT, a pretrained language model based on BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) to address the lack of high-quality, large-scale labeled scientific data. SciBERT leverages unsupervised pretraining on a large multi-domain corpus of scientific publications to improve performance on downstream scientific NLP tasks. We evaluate on a suite of tasks including sequence tagging, sentence classification and dependency parsing, with datasets from a variety of scientific domains. We demonstrate statistically significant improvements over BERT and achieve new state-of-the-art results on several of these tasks. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/allenai/scibert/.

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Code

allenai/scibert officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
charles9n/bert-sklearn mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
georgetown-cset/ai-relevant-papers mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
kuldeep7688/BioMedicalBertNer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tetsu9923/scireviewgen mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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Tasks

Citation Intent ClassificationDependency ParsingGeneral ClassificationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingMedical Named Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Participant Intervention Comparison Outcome ExtractionRelation ExtractionSentenceSentence Classificationmodel

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Citation Intent Classification SciCite SciBERT Macro-F1 86.32 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing GENIA - LAS SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 91.41 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing GENIA - LAS SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 91.26 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing GENIA - UAS SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 92.46 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing GENIA - UAS SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 92.32 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) BC5CDR SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 88.94 #11 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) BC5CDR SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 88.11 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) JNLPBA SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 75.77 #17 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) NCBI-disease SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 86.88 #21 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) NCBI-disease SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 86.45 #23 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) SciERC SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 67.57 #5 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) SciERC SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 65.24 #6 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Participant Intervention Comparison Outcome Extraction EBM-NLP SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 71.18 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Participant Intervention Comparison Outcome Extraction EBM-NLP SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 70.82 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Relation Extraction ChemProt SciBert (Finetune) F1 83.64 #1 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Relation Extraction ChemProt SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 73.7 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Relation Extraction JNLPBA SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 76.09 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Relation Extraction SciERC SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 74.64 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Relation Extraction SciERC SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 74.42 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification ACL-ARC SciBERT F1 70.98 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification Paper Field SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 65.71 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification Paper Field SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 64.02 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification PubMed 20k RCT SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 86.81 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification SciCite SciBERT F1 84.9 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification ScienceCite SciBERT (SciVocab) F1 84.99 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Sentence Classification ScienceCite SciBERT (Base Vocab) F1 84.43 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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