Automatic classification of citation function

Abstract

Citation function is defined as the author's reason for citing a given paper (e.g. acknowledgement of the use of the cited method). The automatic recognition of the rhetorical function of citations in scientific text has many applications, from improvement of impact factor calculations to text summarisation and more informative citation indexers. We show that our annotation scheme for citation function is reliable, and present a supervised machine learning framework to automatically classify citation function, using both shallow and linguistically-inspired features. We find, amongst other things, a strong relationship between citation function and sentiment classification. Category Description Weak Weakness of cited approach CoCoGM Contrast/Comparison in Goals or Methods(neutral) CoCo-Author's work is stated to be superior to cited work CoCoR0 Contrast/Comparison in Results (neutral) CoCoXY Contrast between 2 cited methods PBas Author uses cited work as basis or starting point PUse Author uses tools/algorithms/data/definitions PModi Author adapts or modifies tools/algorithms/data PMot This citation is positive about approach used or problem addressed (used to motivate work in current paper) PSim Author's work and cited work are similar PSup Author's work and cited work are compatible/provide support for each other Neut Neutral description of cited work, or not enough textual evidence for above categories, or unlisted citation function

Functions of Uni- and Multi-citations: Implications for Weighted Citation Analysis

“…This noise is quite serious as a high incidence of perfunctory citations (40% or more) has been repeatedly observed in previous studies (Small, 1982). For example, Teufel, Siddharthan, and Tidhar (2006) found that only a fifth of references are essential for the citing papers, and Moravcsik and Murugesan (1975) noted that 40% references were perfunctory, frequently simply copied from other papers without ever having been read (Dubin, 2004).…”

Counting citations in texts rather than reference lists to improve the accuracy of assessing scientific contribution

“…In recent years, the number of approaches for automatic classification of citations by key words or phrases has grown [9][10][11].…”

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

“…A scientific article may be frequently cited, but it can be due to criticisms or mere acknowledgements, which distinguishes it from an article introducing an approach that is widely accepted and utilised. Several researchers can be mentioned in respect of qualitative citation based indicators in science (Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975;Swales 1986;Cano 1989;Teufel et al 2006;Athar and Teufel 2012). Cronin (1982) conducted a research of citation behaviours and noted that at the time there was not a universal approach in citation studies.…”

“…Application of qualitative citation based indicators often relies on linguistic discourse markers to generate conclusions about citations and citing behaviours. For example, citations can be classified according to sentiment polarities: confirmative or negative (Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975); positive, neutral or weak (Teufel et al 2006). Aspects of qualitative analysis of citations is relevant to our approach.…”

“…This has been widely used in text classification tasks (Teufel et al 2006;Mitchell 1997), and its performance is often comparable to more sophisticated learning methods (Schneider 2005). 4.…”