What one row is
Part of MBDef. The dataset has five tables; start with terms. The other four hold the rows it is built from and share ids. What every column means: Columns.
| Table | One row is | Rows |
|---|---|---|
terms |
a concept with all its definitions, description, synonyms, related terms, subtypes, supertypes and examples, each item merged across papers, with how many papers state it | 34,916 |
concepts |
a concept: every term-in-paper whose label is the same up to spelling | 34,916 |
instances |
a term as one paper defines it ("term-in-paper"), with the relevance scores and everything else extracted for it (description, synonyms, related terms, subtypes, supertypes, examples) | 62,066 |
definitions |
one definition text of a term-in-paper, quoted from the paper | 103,476 |
papers |
a source paper: DOI, title, year, open-access status, licence | 6,115 |
Worked example
The concept “fake news” (concept_id gf8d45d620d38) has 6 spellings, among them “fake news”, “Fake news”, “Fake News”, “Fake news (FN)”, “fake-news”, “fake news (FN)”. It appears as a defined term in 659 papers (659 term-in-paper rows) with 1,891 definitions.
One of its rows in instances is m08713153bd204656: the term “Fake news” in Fog of War: the role of fake news in initiating and prolonging conflict (2026, DOI 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1790164, licence cc-by). Its relevance score is 0.967, combined from three scores: embedding classifier 0.988, LLM decision model 0.997 and retrieval judge 1.000 (how they are combined).
One of its rows in definitions (o04be1d9f462da565) reads:
The term itself describes "a news story that has been released through media and has information that is either greatly exaggerated or completely untrue" (Mara, 2019, p. 4).
For it the paper cites “Mara, 2019, p. 4” (citations column).
Besides definitions, a row lists what else the paper says about its term. The row mc22171ef9e31acfe (“fake news” in An Overview of the Fake News Phenomenon: From Untruth-Driven to Post-Truth-Driven Approaches) lists: description “Fake news connotes intent to deceive and often to do harm.”, “fake news does not exist independently of real news; instead, it exists as a critique o…” (+9 more); synonyms “parody”, “satire” (+6 more); related_terms “post-truth”, “information disorder” (+17 more); subtypes “untruth-driven definition”, “post-truth-driven definition” (+8 more); supertypes “disinformation”; examples “Everything against my opinion is fake news.”.