In all domains and sectors, the demand for intelligent systems to support the processing and generation of digital content is rapidly increasing. The availability of vast amounts of content and the pressure to publish new content quickly and in rapid
succession requires faster, more efficient and smarter processing and generation methods. With a consortium of ten partners from research and industry and a broad range of expertise in AI, Machine Learning and Language Technologies, the QURATOR project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, develops a sustainable and innovative technology platform that provides services to support knowledge workers in various industries to address the challenges they face when curating digital content. The projects vision and ambition is to establish an ecosystem for content curation technologies that significantly pushes the current state of the art and transforms its region, the metropolitan area Berlin-Brandenburg, into a global centre of excellence for curation technologies.
In this paper, we focus on the classification of books using short descriptive texts (cover blurbs) and additional metadata. Building upon BERT, a deep neural language model, we demonstrate how to combine text representations with metadata and knowle
dge graph embeddings, which encode author information. Compared to the standard BERT approach we achieve considerably better results for the classification task. For a more coarse-grained classification using eight labels we achieve an F1- score of 87.20, while a detailed classification using 343 labels yields an F1-score of 64.70. We make the source code and trained models of our experiments publicly available
