Abstract

We study the interplay of the discourse structure of a scientific argument with formal citations. One subproblem of this is to classify academic citations in scientific articles according to their rhetorical function, e.g., as a rival approach, as a part of the solution, or as a flawed approach that justifies the current research. Here, we introduce our annotation scheme with 12 categories, and present an agreement study. 1 Scientific writing, discourse structure and citations In recent years, there has been increasing interest in applying natural language processing technologies to scientific literature. The overwhelmingly large number of papers published in fields like biology, genetics and chemistry each year means that researchers need tools for information access (extraction, retrieval, summarization, question answering etc). There is also increased interest in automatic citation indexing, e.g., the highly successful search tools Google Scholar and CiteSeer (Giles et al., 1998). 1 This general interest in improving access to scientific articles fits well with research on discourse structure, as knowledge about the overall structure and goal of papers can guide better information access. Shum (1998) argues that experienced researchers are often interested in relations between articles. They need to know if a certain article criticises another and what the criticism is, or if the current work is based on that prior work. This type of information is hard to come by with current search technology. Neither the author’s abstract, nor raw citation counts help users in assessing the relation between articles. And even though CiteSeer shows a text snippet around the physical location for searchers to peruse, there is no guarantee that the text snippet provides enough information for the searcher to infer the relation. In fact, studies from our annotated corpus (Teufel, 1999), show that 69 % of the 600 sentences stating contrast with other work and 21 % of the 246 sentences stating research continuation with other work do not contain the corresponding citation; the citation is found in preceding

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