Towards the Automatic Identification of the Nature of Citations

Abstract

The reasons why an author cites other publications are varied: an author can cite previous works to gain assistance of some sort in the form of background information, ideas, methods, or to review, critique or refute previous works. The problem is that the best possible way to retrieve the nature of citations is very time consuming: one should read article by article to assign a particular characterisation to each citation. In this paper we propose an algorithm, called CiTalO, to infer automatically the function of citations by means of Semantic Web technologies and NLP techniques. We also present some preliminary experiments and discuss some strengths and limitations of this approach.