Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers

Xiangci Li, Jessica Ouyang


Abstract
The rapid pace of research publications makes it challenging for researchers to stay up to date. There is a growing need for automatically generated, concise literature reviews to help researchers quickly identify papers relevant to their interests. Prior work over the past decade has focused on summarizing individual research papers, typically in the context of citation generation, while the relationships among multiple papers have largely been overlooked. Existing approaches primarily generate standalone citation sentences without addressing the need for expository and transition sentences to explain the relationships among multiple citations. In this work, we propose a feature-based, LLM-prompting approach to generate richer citation texts and simultaneously capture the complex relationships among multiple papers. Our expert evaluation reveals a strong correlation between human preference and integrative writing styles, indicating that readers favor high-level, abstract citations with transition sentences that weave them into a coherent narrative.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1080–1105
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.73/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiangci Li and Jessica Ouyang. 2025. Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1080–1105, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers (Li & Ouyang, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.73.pdf