A Deep Multi-Tasking Approach Leveraging on Cited-Citing Paper Relationship For Citation Intent Classification

Citations are crucial artifacts to provide additional information to the reader to comprehend the research under concern. There are different roles that citations play in scientific discourse. Correctly identifying the intent of the citations finds applications ranging from predicting scholarly impact, finding idea propagation, to text summarization. With the rapid growth in scientific literature, the need for automated methods to classify citations is now growing intense. However, we can only fully understand the intent of a citation if we look at the citation context in the citing paper and also the primary purpose of the cited article. In this work, we propose a neural multi-task learning framework that harnesses the structural information of the research papers and the cited paper’s information for the effective classification of citation intents. We analyze the impact of three auxiliary tasks on the performance of our approach for citation classification. Our experiments on three benchmark citation classification datasets show that incorporating cited paper information (title) shows that our deep neural model achieves a new state-of-the-art on the ACL-ARC dataset with an absolute increase of 5.3% in the F1 score over the previous best model. We also achieve comparable performance with respect to the best-performing systems in the SDP 2021 3C Shared task on Citation Context Classification. We make our codes available at https://github.com/Tirthankar-Ghosal/citationclassification-SCIM.