Controllable Citation Sentence Generation with Language Models

Nianlong Gu, Richard Hahnloser


Abstract
Citation generation aims to generate a citation sentence that refers to a chosen paper in the context of a manuscript. However, a rigid citation generation process is at odds with an author’s desire to control specific attributes, such as 1) the citation intent, e.g., either introducing background information or comparing results, and 2) keywords that should appear in the citation text. To provide these degrees of controllability during citation generation, we propose to integrate the manuscript context, the context of the referenced paper, and the desired control attributes into a structured template and use it to fine-tune a language model (LM) via next-token prediction. We then utilize Proximal Policy Optimization to directly optimize the LM in favor of a high score of our proposed controllability metric. The proposed workflow harmoniously combines citation attribute suggestion and conditional citation generation into one LM, allowing for better user control.
Anthology ID:
2024.sdp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Tirthankar Ghosal, Amanpreet Singh, Anita Waard, Philipp Mayr, Aakanksha Naik, Orion Weller, Yoonjoo Lee, Shannon Shen, Yanxia Qin
Venues:
sdp | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sdp-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nianlong Gu and Richard Hahnloser. 2024. Controllable Citation Sentence Generation with Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024), pages 22–37, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Citation Sentence Generation with Language Models (Gu & Hahnloser, sdp-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sdp-1.4.pdf