Ontology-Guided Knowledge Graph Construction from Structured Metadata and Climate Science Publications

Aayush Acharya, Qi Zhang, Eduard Dragut, Longin Jan Latecki


Abstract
The rapid expansion of scientific literature far outpaces the speed of manual curation, creating a fundamental bottleneck in extracting structured knowledge from scientific texts. To address this, we introduce an agentic, ontology-guided framework for knowledge graph (KG) construction. Our framework utilizes specialized agents for document understanding, information extraction, ontology conformance, and entity linking. First, an LLM extracts factual knowledge in the form of triples with explicit textual evidence from research papers. Then the triplets undergo a multistage verification process to ground the triplets in the ontology. By enforcing schema constraints and requiring evidence in the form of text fragments, we ensure the data is both semantically consistent and traceable. In an agreement study over 1,000 extracted triplets, Gemini-2.5-flash achieves Cohen’s 𝜅 scores of 0.640–0.700 against three human annotators, matching the human–human agreement range of 0.616–0.689. We applied this framework to 2,000 scientific publications and construct a novel, ontology-grounded KG for climate science with 133,990 nodes and 755,308 relations; of the 23,327 triplets that the publications contribute after validation, 98.96% are judged correct. The pipeline code and KG is publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.252
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5615–5642
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.252/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aayush Acharya, Qi Zhang, Eduard Dragut, and Longin Jan Latecki. 2026. Ontology-Guided Knowledge Graph Construction from Structured Metadata and Climate Science Publications. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5615–5642, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ontology-Guided Knowledge Graph Construction from Structured Metadata and Climate Science Publications (Acharya et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.252.pdf