Rebiber: A tool for normalizing bibtex with official info.

We often cite papers using their arXiv versions without noting that they are already PUBLISHED in some conferences. These unofficial bib entries might violate rules about submissions or camera-ready versions for some conferences. We introduce Rebiber, a simple tool in Python to fix them automatically. It is based on the official conference information from the DBLP or the ACL anthology (for NLP conferences)! You can check the list of supported conferences here. Apart from handling outdated arXiv citations, Rebiber also normalizes citations in a unified way (DBLP-style), supporting abbreviation and value selection.

Web demo: https://rebiber.herokuapp.com/ (recommended).

Colab notebook: here (a bit outdated).

Changelog

• 2021.09.06 We fixed a few minor bugs and added features such as sorting and urls to arXiv (if the paper is not in any conferences; thanks to @nicola-decao). We also updated the ACL anthology bib/json to the latest version as well as other conferences.

• 2021.05.30 We build a beta version of our web app for Rebiber; add new conferences to our dataset; fix a few minor bugs.

• 2021.02.08 We now support multiple useful features: 1) turning off some certain values, e.g., "-r url,pages,address" for removing the values from the output, 2) using abbr. to shorten the booktitle values, e.g., Proceedings of the .* Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics --> Proc. of ACL. More examples are here.

• 2021.01.30 We build a colab notebook as a simple web demo. link

Installation

# pip install rebiber -U # for the stable version
pip install -e git+https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber.git#egg=rebiber -U
# rebiber --update  # (optional) update the bib data and the abbr. info  (using wget)

OR

git clone https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber.git
cd rebiber/
pip install -e .

If you would like to use the latest github version with more bug fixes, please use the second installation method.

Usage（v1.1.3）

Normalize your bibtex file with the official conference information:

rebiber -i /path/to/input.bib -o /path/to/output.bib

You can find a pair of example input and output files in rebiber/example_input.bib and rebiber/example_output.bib.

argument	usage
-i	or --input_bib. The path to the input bib file that you want to update
-o	or --output_bib. The path to the output bib file that you want to save. If you don't specify any -o then it will be the same as the -i.
-r	or --remove. A comma-separated list of value names that you want to remove, such as "-r pages,editor,volume,month,url,biburl,address,publisher,bibsource,timestamp,doi". Empty by default.
-s	or --shorten. A bool argument that is "False" by default, used for replacing booktitle with abbreviation in -a. Used as -s True.
-d	or --deduplicate. A bool argument that is "True" by default, used for removing the duplicate bib entries sharing the same key. Used as -d True.
-l	or --bib_list. The path to the list of the bib json files to be loaded. Check rebiber/bib_list.txt for the default file. Usually you don't need to set this argument.
-a	or --abbr_tsv. The list of conference abbreviation data. Check rebiber/abbr.tsv for the default file. Usually you don't need to set this argument.
-u	or --update. Update the local bib-related data with the latest Github version.
-v	or --version. Print the version of current Rebiber.
-st	or --sort. A bool argument that is "False" by default. used for keeping the original order of the bib entries of the input file. By setting it to be "True", the bib entries are ordered alphabetically in the output file. Used as -st True.

Example Input and Output

An example input entry with the arXiv information (from Google Scholar or somewhere):

@article{lin2020birds,
	title={Birds have four legs?! NumerSense: Probing Numerical Commonsense Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models},
	author={Lin, Bill Yuchen and Lee, Seyeon and Khanna, Rahul and Ren, Xiang},
	journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00683},
	year={2020}
}

An example normalized output entry with the official information:

@inproceedings{lin2020birds,
    title = "{B}irds have four legs?! {N}umer{S}ense: {P}robing {N}umerical {C}ommonsense {K}nowledge of {P}re-{T}rained {L}anguage {M}odels",
    author = "Lin, Bill Yuchen  and
      Lee, Seyeon  and
      Khanna, Rahul  and
      Ren, Xiang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.emnlp-main.557",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.557",
    pages = "6862--6868",
}

Supported Conferences

The bib_list.txt contains a list of converted json files of the official bib data. In this repo, we now support the full ACL anthology, i.e., all papers that are published at *CL conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, etc.) as well as workshops. Also, we support any conference proceedings that can be downloaded from DBLP, for example, ICLR2020.

The following conferences are supported and their bib/json files are in our data folder. You can turn each item on/off in bib_list.txt. Please feel free to create PR for adding new conferences following this!

Name	Years
ACL Anthology	(until 2021-09)
AAAI	2010 -- 2020
AISTATS	2013 -- 2020
ALENEX	2010 -- 2020
ASONAM	2010 -- 2019
BigDataConf	2013 -- 2019
BMVC	2010 -- 2020
CHI	2010 -- 2020
CIDR	2009 -- 2020
CIKM	2010 -- 2020
COLT	2000 -- 2020
CVPR	2000 -- 2020
ICASSP	2015 -- 2020
ICCV	2003 -- 2019
ICLR	2013 -- 2020
ICML	2000 -- 2020
IJCAI	2011 -- 2020
KDD	2010 -- 2020
MLSys	2019 -- 2020
MM	2016 -- 2020
NeurIPS	2000 -- 2020
RECSYS	2010 -- 2020
SDM	2010 -- 2020
SIGIR	2010 -- 2020
SIGMOD	2010 -- 2020
SODA	2010 -- 2020
STOC	2010 -- 2020
UAI	2010 -- 2020
WSDM	2008 -- 2020
WWW (The Web Conf)	2001 -- 2020

Thanks for Anton Tsitsulin's great work on collecting such a complete set bib files!

Adding a new conference

You can manually add any conferences from DBLP by downloading their bib files to our raw_data folder, and run a prepared script add_conf.sh.

Take ICLR2020 and ICLR2019 as an example:

• Step 1: Go to DBLP
• Step 2: Download the bib files, and put them here as raw_data/iclr2020.bib and raw_data/iclr2019.bib (name should be in the format as {conf_name}{year}.bib)
• Step 3: Run script

bash add_conf.sh iclr 2019 2020

Contact

Please email yuchen.lin@usc.edu or create Github issues here if you have any questions or suggestions.