A Rhetorical Citation Graph Model for Characterizing Scientific Findings: Resource Construction and Application to Plant Health

Anne-Sophie Foussat, Robert Bossy, Vincent Guigue, Nicolas Sauvion, Claire Nédellec


Abstract
Understanding how scientific findings are discussed and evaluated over time provides valuable evidence for assessing their reliability. We propose the Rhetorical Citation Graph (RCG), a finding-centric graph model that represents citation events by explicitly linking scientific findings, citing articles, rhetorical functions, and citation contexts. We instantiate this model as the Plant Literature Reliability Network (PLIN), a graph of 262,807 citation events automatically constructed from the plant-health literature using Natural Language Processing methods for citation and finding extraction, and rhetorical stance classification. By integrating provenance data with the rhetorical interpretation expressed in citation contexts, the RCG provides structured evidence for contextual analyses of scientific findings and lays the foundation for longitudinal studies of their evolution, scientific consensus, and reliability. Finally, we illustrate the utility of PLIN through a case study on the curation and enrichment of the EPPO Global Database, a reference knowledge base for plant health.
Anthology ID:
2026.akbc-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC 2026)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Jan-Christoph Kalo, Ndapa Nakashole, Simon Razniewski, Fabian M. Suchanek, Andreas Vlachos, Andrew McCallum
Venues:
AKBC | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
247–260
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.akbc-1.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anne-Sophie Foussat, Robert Bossy, Vincent Guigue, Nicolas Sauvion, and Claire Nédellec. 2026. A Rhetorical Citation Graph Model for Characterizing Scientific Findings: Resource Construction and Application to Plant Health. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC 2026), pages 247–260, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Rhetorical Citation Graph Model for Characterizing Scientific Findings: Resource Construction and Application to Plant Health (Foussat et al., AKBC 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.akbc-1.18.pdf