# Talk2Ref: A Dataset for Reference Prediction from Scientific Talks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24478/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [SONAR: Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11466/) (2023)
- [Content-Based Citation Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08301/) (2018)
- [A Context-Aware Citation Recommendation Model with BERT and Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06464/) (2019)
- [Local Citation Recommendation with Hierarchical-Attention Text Encoder and SciBERT-based Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01206/) (2021)
- [CiteBART: Learning to Generate Citations for Local Citation Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17534/) (2024)
- [Dual Attention Model for Citation Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00182/) (2020)
- [Citation Recommendation for Research Papers via Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05633/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific talks are a growing medium for disseminating research, and automatically identifying relevant literature that grounds or enriches a talk would be highly valuable for researchers and students alike. We introduce Reference Prediction from Talks (RPT), a new task that maps long, and unstructured scientific presentations to relevant papers. To support research on RPT, we present Talk2Ref, the first large-scale dataset of its kind, containing 6,279 talks and 43,429 cited papers (26 per talk on average), where relevance is approximated by the papers cited in the talk's corresponding source publication. We establish strong baselines by evaluating state-of-the-art text embedding models in zero-shot retrieval scenarios, and propose a dual-encoder architecture trained on Talk2Ref. We further explore strategies for handling long transcripts, as well as training for domain adaptation. Our results show that fine-tuning on Talk2Ref significantly improves citation prediction performance, demonstrating both the challenges of the task and the effectiveness of our dataset for learning semantic representations from spoken scientific content. The dataset and trained models are released under an open license to foster future research on integrating spoken scientific communication into citation recommendation systems.