Cross-Lingual Keyword Extraction for Pesticide Terminology in Brazilian Portuguese and English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agriculture plays a crucial role in Brazil's economy. As the country intensifies its activities in the sector, the use of pesticides also increases. Hence, the risks associated with pesticide-laden food consumption have become a concern for chemistry researchers. An issue affecting regulatory standardization of pesticides in Brazil is the difficulty in translating pesticide names, particularly from English. For example, the word malathion can be translated from English to Portuguese as malatiom or malatião, resulting in inconsistent labeling. This issue extends to the broader problem of translating highly technical terms between languages, in particular for low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate terminological variation in the chemistry of organophosphorus pesticides. Our goal is to study strategies for domain-specific multilingual keyword extraction. To that end, two corpora were built based on pesticide-related scientific documents in Brazilian Portuguese and English, which led to a total of 84 and 210 texts, respectively, representing the low- and high-resource languages in this study. We then assessed 6 methods for keyword extraction: Simple Maths, TF-IDF, YAKE, TextRank, MultipartiteRank, and KeyBERT. We relied on a multilingual contextual BERT embedding to retrieve corresponding pesticide names in the target language. Fine-tuning was also explored to improve the multilingual representation further. Moreover, we evaluated the use of large language models (LLMs) combined with the recent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework. As a result, we found that the contextual approach, combined with fine-tuning, provided the best results, contributing to enhancing Pesticide Terminology Extraction in a multilingual scenario.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".