Automatic classification of citation function

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2006), pages 103–110, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Automatic classification of citation function Simone Teufel Advaith Siddharthan Dan Tidhar Natural Language and Information Processing Group Computer Laboratory Cambridge University, CB3 0FD, UK {Simone.Teufel,Advaith.Siddharthan,Dan.Tidhar}@cl.cam.ac.uk Abstract Citation function is defined as the author’s reason for citing a given paper (e.g. ac- knowledgement of the use of the cited method). The automatic recognition of the rhetorical function of citations in scientific text has many applications, from improve- ment of impact factor calculations to text summarisation and more informative ci- tation indexers. We show that our anno- tation scheme for citation function is re- liable, and present a supervised machine learning framework to automatically clas- sify citation function, using both shallow and linguistically-inspired features. We find, amongst other things, a strong re- lationship between citation function and sentiment classification. 1 Introduction Why do researchers cite a particular paper? This is a question that has interested researchers in discourse analysis, sociology of science, and in- formation sciences (library sciences) for decades (Garfield, 1979; Small, 1982; White, 2004). Many annotation schemes for citation motivation have been created over the years, and the question has been studied in detail, even to the level of in-depth interviews with writers about each individual cita- tion (Hodges, 1972). Part of this sustained interest in citations can be explained by the fact that bibliometric met- rics are commonly used to measure the impact of a researcher’s work by how often they are cited (Borgman, 1990; Luukkonen, 1992). However, re- searchers from the field of discourse studies have long criticised purely quantitative citation analy- sis, pointing out that many citations are done out of “politeness, policy or piety” (Ziman, 1968), and that criticising citations or citations in pass- ing should not “count” as much as central cita- tions in a paper, or as those citations where a re- searcher’s work is used as the starting point of somebody else’s work (Bonzi, 1982). A plethora of manual annotation schemes for citation motiva- tion have been invented over the years (Garfield, 1979; Hodges, 1972; Chubin and Moitra, 1975). Other schemes concentrate on citation function (Spiegel-R¨using, 1977; O’Connor, 1982; Wein- stock, 1971; Swales, 1990; Small, 1982)). One of the best-known of these studies (Moravcsik and Murugesan, 1975) divides citations in running text into four dimensions: conceptual or opera- tional use (i.e., use of theory vs. use of technical method); evolutionary or juxtapositional (i.e., own work is based on the cited work vs. own work is an alternative to it); organic or perfunctory (i.e., work is crucially needed for understanding of citing ar- ticle or just a general acknowledgement); and fi- nally confirmative vs. negational (i.e., is the cor- rectness of the findings disputed?). They found, for example, that 40% of the citations were per- functory, which casts further doubt on the citation- counting approach. Based on such annotation schemes and hand- analyzed data, different influences on citation be- haviour …

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