Large-scale Evaluation of Transformer-based Article Encoders on the Task of Citation Recommendation

Zoran Medić, Jan Snajder


Abstract
Recently introduced transformer-based article encoders (TAEs) designed to produce similar vector representations for mutually related scientific articles have demonstrated strong performance on benchmark datasets for scientific article recommendation. However, the existing benchmark datasets are predominantly focused on single domains and, in some cases, contain easy negatives in small candidate pools. Evaluating representations on such benchmarks might obscure the realistic performance of TAEs in setups with thousands of articles in candidate pools. In this work, we evaluate TAEs on large benchmarks with more challenging candidate pools. We compare the performance of TAEs with a lexical retrieval baseline model BM25 on the task of citation recommendation, where the model produces a list of recommendations for citing in a given input article. We find out that BM25 is still very competitive with the state-of-the-art neural retrievers, a finding which is surprising given the strong performance of TAEs on small benchmarks. As a remedy for the limitations of the existing benchmarks, we propose a new benchmark dataset for evaluating scientific article representations: Multi-Domain Citation Recommendation dataset (MDCR), which covers different scientific fields and contains challenging candidate pools.
Anthology ID:
2022.sdp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Arman Cohan, Guy Feigenblat, Dayne Freitag, Tirthankar Ghosal, Drahomira Herrmannova, Petr Knoth, Kyle Lo, Philipp Mayr, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Anita de Waard, Lucy Lu Wang
Venue:
sdp
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sdp-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zoran Medić and Jan Snajder. 2022. Large-scale Evaluation of Transformer-based Article Encoders on the Task of Citation Recommendation. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, pages 19–31, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large-scale Evaluation of Transformer-based Article Encoders on the Task of Citation Recommendation (Medić & Snajder, sdp 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sdp-1.3.pdf
Code
 zoranmedic/mdcr
Data
S2ORCTREC-COVID