Automatic Generation of Citation Texts in Scholarly Papers: A Pilot Study

Xinyu Xing, Xiaosheng Fan, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
In this paper, we study the challenging problem of automatic generation of citation texts in scholarly papers. Given the context of a citing paper A and a cited paper B, the task aims to generate a short text to describe B in the given context of A. One big challenge for addressing this task is the lack of training data. Usually, explicit citation texts are easy to extract, but it is not easy to extract implicit citation texts from scholarly papers. We thus first train an implicit citation extraction model based on BERT and leverage the model to construct a large training dataset for the citation text generation task. Then we propose and train a multi-source pointer-generator network with cross attention mechanism for citation text generation. Empirical evaluation results on a manually labeled test dataset verify the efficacy of our model. This pilot study confirms the feasibility of automatically generating citation texts in scholarly papers and the technique has the great potential to help researchers prepare their scientific papers.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.550
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6181–6190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.550
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.550
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Xing, Xiaosheng Fan, and Xiaojun Wan. 2020. Automatic Generation of Citation Texts in Scholarly Papers: A Pilot Study. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6181–6190, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Generation of Citation Texts in Scholarly Papers: A Pilot Study (Xing et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.550.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928700