Predicting the Age of Scientific Papers

In this paper we show how the age of scientific papers can be predicted given a diachronic corpus of papers from a particular domain published over a certain time period. We first train ordinal regression models for the task of predicting the age of individual sentences by fine-tuning series of BERT models for binary classification. We then aggregate the prediction results on individual sentences into a final result for entire papers. Using two corpora of publications from the International World Wide Web Conference and the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, we compare various result aggregation methods, and show that the sentence-based approach produces better results than the direct document-level method.