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Article · Highly available systems · January 1, 2026

Comparative analysis of approaches to automatic classification of mathematical scientific articles based on UDC codes

B. T. Gizatullin, Невзорова Ольга Авенировна

Bulat Gizatullin
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Abstract

Problem statement. The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is a hierarchical system for indexing scientific publications; a paper may be assigned one or several codes. Manual labeling is labor-intensive and may be inconsistent, motivating automatic assignment. For Russian mathematical texts, the task is complicated by domain-specific terminology and formulas. Prior work includes classical ML and similarity-based methods [1], BERT-based multi-label models [2], hybrid recommender-style schemes [3], methods with explicit modeling of the UDC hierarchy [4], and large language models [5]. Purpose. We comparatively analyze approaches to automatic UDC classification for Russian mathematical publications and identify effective combinations of text representations and models in two settings: single-label (primary code) and multi-label (all codes). Methods. We evaluate TF-IDF, Word2Vec and Sci-Rus-tiny [6] with logistic regression and CatBoost on 4,194 Math-Net.Ru papers using a temporal split (train up to 2020, test starts from 2021) and truncated UDC codes. Results. For single-label, TF-IDF + logistic regression performs best and achieves Accuracy@3 0.97, suggesting most errors remain within nearby branches. TF-IDF + CatBoost is close but more imbalance-sensitive; Word2Vec and Sci-Rus-tiny are. For multi-label, per-class thresholds are tuned on validation; TF-IDF + logistic regression leads with higher top-level scores. Hard cases are within-branch confusions; informative TF-IDF terms align with topical codes. Practical significance. The pipeline enables automated categorization in scientific archives and libraries, UDC recommendations, and detection of potentially misassigned codes.

Text and Document Classification TechnologiesTopic Modelingscientometrics and bibliometrics researchUniversal Decimal Classificationautomatic classificationmulti-label classification

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