CiteBench: A Benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation

Martin Funkquist, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Science progresses by building upon the prior body of knowledge documented in scientific publications. The acceleration of research makes it hard to stay up-to-date with the recent developments and to summarize the ever-growing body of prior work. To address this, the task of citation text generation aims to produce accurate textual summaries given a set of papers-to-cite and the citing paper context. Due to otherwise rare explicit anchoring of cited documents in the citing paper, citation text generation provides an excellent opportunity to study how humans aggregate and synthesize textual knowledge from sources. Yet, existing studies are based upon widely diverging task definitions, which makes it hard to study this task systematically. To address this challenge, we propose CiteBench: a benchmark for citation text generation that unifies multiple diverse datasets and enables standardized evaluation of citation text generation models across task designs and domains. Using the new benchmark, we investigate the performance of multiple strong baselines, test their transferability between the datasets, and deliver new insights into the task definition and evaluation to guide future research in citation text generation. We make the code for CiteBench publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/citebench.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.455
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7337–7353
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.455
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.455
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Martin Funkquist, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, and Iryna Gurevych. 2023. CiteBench: A Benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7337–7353, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CiteBench: A Benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation (Funkquist et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.455.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.455.mp4