Generating Research Data Metadata from Their Accompanying README Files

Abstract

Software repositories have conventionally been used for software development. Recently, they have also served as research data repositories. Research data published in such repositories are frequently accompanied by README files; however, the data frequently lack structured metadata. To address this issue, this paper investigates the feasibility of generating research data metadata from their accompanying README files. First, we analyze the occurrence patterns of metadata-related information in README files. The results of this analysis demonstrated that README files could serve as valuable resources for metadata generation. We then performed an experiment on extracting metadata-related information from README files using large language models (LLMs) and evaluated their performance. The experimental results demonstrated that LLMs could extract metadata-related information with high performance.

Resources

Details