Contextualizing Generated Citation Texts

Biswadip Mandal, Xiangci Li, Jessica Ouyang


Abstract
Abstractive citation text generation is usually framed as an infilling task, where a sequence-to-sequence model is trained to generate a citation given a reference paper and the context window around the target; the generated citation should be a brief discussion of the reference paper as it relates to the citing context. However, examining a recent LED-based citation generation system, we find that many of the generated citations are generic summaries of the reference paper’s main contribution, ignoring the citation context’s focus on a different topic. To address this problem, we propose a simple modification to the citation text generation task: the generation target is not only the citation itself, but the entire context window, including the target citation. This approach can be easily applied to any abstractive citation generation system, and our experimental results show that training in this way is preferred by human readers and allows the generation model to make use of contextual clues about what topic to discuss and what stance to take.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.340
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3849–3854
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.340
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Biswadip Mandal, Xiangci Li, and Jessica Ouyang. 2024. Contextualizing Generated Citation Texts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3849–3854, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Contextualizing Generated Citation Texts (Mandal et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.340.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.340.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip