Classifying citations according to their purpose and importance is a challenging task that has gained considerable interest in recent years. This interest has been primarily driven by the need to create more transparent, efficient, merit-based reward systems in academia; a system that goes beyond simple bibliometric measures and considers the semantics of citations. Such systems that quantify and classify the influence of citations can act as edges that link knowledge nodes to a graph and enable efficient knowledge discovery. While a number of researchers have experimented with a variety of models, these experiments are typically limited to single-domain applications and the resulting models are hardly comparable. Recently, two Citation Context Classification (3C) shared tasks (at WOSP2020 and SDP2021) created the first benchmark enabling direct comparison of citation classification approaches, revealing the crucial impact of supplementary data on the performance of models. Reflecting from the findings of these shared tasks, we are releasing a new multi-disciplinary dataset, ACT2, an extended SDP 3C shared task dataset. This modified corpus has annotations for both citation function and importance classes newly enriched with supplementary contextual and non-contextual feature sets the selection of which follows from the lists of features used by the more successful teams in these shared tasks. Additionally, we include contextual features for cited papers (e.g. Abstract of the cited paper), which most existing datasets lack, but which have a lot of potential to improve results. We describe the methodology used for feature extraction and the challenges involved in the process. The feature enriched ACT2 dataset is available at https://github.com/oacore/ACT2.

We investigate the effect of varying citation context window sizes on model performance in citation intent classification. Prior studies have been limited to the application of fixed-size contiguous citation contexts or the use of manually curated citation contexts. We introduce a new automated unsupervised approach for the selection of a dynamic-size and potentially non-contiguous citation context, which utilises the transformer-based document representations and embedding similarities. Our experiments show that the addition of non-contiguous citing sentences improves performance beyond previous results. Evalu- ating on the (1) domain-specific (ACL-ARC) and (2) the multi-disciplinary (SDP-ACT) dataset demonstrates that the inclusion of additional context beyond the citing sentence significantly improves the citation classifi- cation model’s performance, irrespective of the dataset’s domain. We release the datasets and the source code used for the experiments at: https://github.com/oacore/dynamic_citation_context

The 3C Citation Context Classification task is the first shared task addressing citation context classification. The two subtasks, A and B, associated with this shared task, involves the classification of citations based on their purpose and influence, respectively. Both tasks use a portion of the new ACT dataset, developed by the researchers at The Open University, UK. The tasks were hosted on Kaggle, and the participated systems were evaluated using the macro f-score. Three teams participated in subtask A and four teams participated in subtask B. The best performing systems obtained an overall score of 0.2056 for subtask A and 0.5556 for subtask B, outperforming the simple majority class baseline models, which scored 0.11489 and 0.32249, respectively. In this paper we provide a report specifying the shared task, the dataset used, a short description of the participating systems and the final results obtained by the teams based on the evaluation criteria. The shared task has been organised as part of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP 2020) workshop.