Research Entity Extraction and Topic Detection from UKRI Grant Proposals

Research funding discovery remains fundamentally fragmented: researchers navigate disparate agency portals (e.g., in the United States, NSF, NIH, DARPA, Grants.gov, and many others) with heterogeneous interfaces, search capabilities, and data schemas. We present a compound AI system that unifies this landscape through two tightly coupled components: (1) an aggregation layer that autonomously collects, normalizes, and indexes almost 12,000 federal and nonprofit opportunities from fragmented sources via LLM-equipped browser agents, maintaining a biweekly-updated unified database; and (2) an agentic ReAct-based query processing layer that interprets research context (including from PDF documents) and employs hybrid search combining a structured index with selective web search to retrieve relevant opportunities - while avoiding LLM hallucination. The conversational interface supports iterative refinement through multi-turn interactions, allowing researchers to progressively apply constraints without reformulating their core research description. Results stream in real time with full transparency of intermediate reasoning, enabling appropriate calibration of user trust. Currently used by almost 3,000+ users, our approach demonstrates the feasibility of compound AI in reducing grant discovery time from 30--45 minutes (manual, fragmented portal searches) to under 10 minutes (unified, conversational search).

Understanding the historical allocation and distribution of research funding advances our knowledge of how scientific research is supported across fields, institutions, and regions. However, large-scale analyses are hindered by the lack of comprehensive funder name disambiguation solutions, as funder names often exhibit spelling variations, translations, abbreviations, and inconsistent levels of granularity. In this paper, we present a framework for developing multilingual, multi-functional funder name disambiguation models and demonstrate its application to research publications in biodiversity conservation. To construct a training dataset, we integrated the Research Organization Registry (ROR), which provides unique identifiers for research organizations, with two publication datasets: the Web of Science (WoS) and the Crossref Open Funder Registry (OFR). We used multi-task learning with Contrastive Loss and Multiple Negatives Ranking Loss to fine-tune three open-weight embedding models from the Sentence Transformer, Gemma, and Qwen3 families. The best-performing models achieved accuracy above 0.90 when matching WoS funder names to ROR identifiers, outperforming general-purpose LLMs, including GPT-5.2, Claude-Sonnet-4.6, and Gemini-2.5-Flash, by more than 0.1. For funder names not indexed in ROR, we constructed a similarity network among funder names and identified clusters within it. Finally, we analyzed the disambiguation results and highlighted challenges arising from limited knowledge of smaller funders and funders from non-English-speaking countries. This work provides a reusable framework for funder name disambiguation with potential applicability across different model architectures and datasets, featuring cost-effective training data creation and multi-task learning and disambiguation.

The relentless expansion of scientific literature presents significant challenges for navigation and knowledge discovery. Within Research Information Retrieval, established tasks such as text summarization and classification remain crucial for enabling researchers and practitioners to effectively navigate this vast landscape, so that efforts have increasingly been focused on developing advanced research information systems. These systems aim not only to provide standard keyword-based search functionalities but also to incorporate capabilities for automatic content categorization within knowledge-intensive organizations across academia and industry. This study systematically evaluates the performance of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) in analyzing scientific texts according to a given classification scheme. We utilized the hierarchical ORKG taxonomy as a classification framework, employing the FORC dataset as ground truth. We investigated the effectiveness of advanced prompt engineering strategies, namely In-Context Learning (ICL) and Prompt Chaining, and experimentally explored the influence of the LLMs' temperature hyperparameter on classification accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that Prompt Chaining yields superior classification accuracy compared to pure ICL, particularly when applied to the nested structure of the ORKG taxonomy. LLMs with prompt chaining outperform the state-of-the-art models for domain (1st level) prediction and show even better performance for subject (2nd level) prediction compared to the older BERT model. However, LLMs are not yet able to perform well in classifying the topic (3rd level) of research areas based on this specific hierarchical taxonomy, as they only reach about 50% accuracy even with prompt chaining.