Citation Context Classification: Critical vs Non-critical

AbstractRecently, there have been numerous research in Natural Language Processing on citation analysis in scientific literature. Studies of citation behavior aim at finding how researchers cited a paper in their work. In this paper, we are interested in identifying cited papers that are criticized. Recent research introduces the concept of Critical citations which provides a useful theoretical framework, making criticism an important part of scientific progress. Indeed, identifying critics could be a way to spot errors and thus encourage self-correction of science. In this work, we investigate how to automatically classify the critical citation contexts using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our classification task consists of predicting critical or non-critical labels for citation contexts. For this, we experiment and compare different methods, including rule-based and machine learning methods, to classify critical vs. non-critical citation contexts. Our experiments show that fine-tuning pretrained transformer model RoBERTa achieved the highest performance among all systems.