Linguistic perspectives in deciphering citation function classification

Abstract

Understanding citations within their context is a complex task in information science, critical for bibliometric analysis. The study of citation contexts and their types has been a central issue in recent work on citations. In this paper, we present an experiment on the semantic annotation of citation contexts using a rule-based approach. We processed articles from seven PLOS journals and performed semantic annotation of citation contexts based on linguistic resources we constructed. We built on previous work on verb form analysis, n-grams, and semantic category modeling in the form of a linguistic ontology. Based on our observations, we propose directions of work for the constitution of a semantically annotated corpora. The intermediate results obtained lead us to formulate hypotheses on the relation between the IMRaD structure and certain semantic categories. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the semantic richness of citation contexts and underscore the importance of access to full-text articles for ontology population in open science. The findings suggest that semantic categories vary across disciplines and rhetorical structures, necessitating further exploration with larger and more diverse datasets.