Extracting Published Discussions of 13,616 Galaxies with Language Models

Nolan Koblischke, Jo Bovy


Abstract
Astronomers often have difficulty determining whether an object, such as a star or galaxy of interest, has been discussed in the literature. Existing tools enable object identification and linking in papers but do not record whether an object was genuinely discussed in a paper or just appears in a table or catalog. We address this by using language model agents to identify galaxies discussed in more than two sentences across a corpus of 156,006 arXiv astro-ph papers and extract those discussions. We extract 44,332 discussions of individual galaxies containing 85,314 quotes from 18,641 papers. With sky coordinates for 98.2% of discussions, we group them into 13,616 galaxies. We bring these results together into GalaxyWiki, where users can find literature discussing galaxies, read what was said about them, and follow links to the source papers. The code, dataset, and webpage are available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/galaxywiki-paper.
Anthology ID:
2026.wasp-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, Zhuhai, China
Editors:
Alberto Accomazzi, Tirthankar Ghosal, Felix Grezes, Kelly Lockhart, Atilla Kaan Alkan
Venues:
WASP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
174–179
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wasp-1.19/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nolan Koblischke and Jo Bovy. 2026. Extracting Published Discussions of 13,616 Galaxies with Language Models. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications, pages 174–179, Hengqin, Zhuhai, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extracting Published Discussions of 13,616 Galaxies with Language Models (Koblischke & Bovy, WASP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wasp-1.19.pdf