Citations are crucial in scientific research articles as they highlight the connection between the current study and prior work. However, this process is often time-consuming for researchers. In this study, we propose the SciRGC framework, which aims to automatically recommend citation articles and generate citation sentences for citation locations within articles. The framework addresses two key challenges in academic citation generation: 1) how to accurately identify the author's citation intent and find relevant citation papers, and 2) how to generate high-quality citation sentences that align with human preferences. We enhance citation recommendation accuracy in the citation article recommendation module by incorporating citation networks and sentiment intent, and generate reasoning-based citation sentences in the citation sentence generation module by using the original article abstract, local context, citation intent, and recommended articles as inputs. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation metric to fairly assess the quality of generated citation sentences. Through comparisons with baseline models and ablation experiments, the SciRGC framework not only improves the accuracy and relevance of citation recommendations but also ensures the appropriateness of the generated citation sentences in context, providing a valuable tool for interdisciplinary researchers.

Academic research is an exploratory activity to discover new solutions to problems. By this nature, academic research works perform literature reviews to distinguish their novelties from prior work. In natural language processing, this literature review is usually conducted under the "Related Work" section. The task of related work generation aims to automatically generate the related work section given the rest of the research paper and a list of papers to cite. Prior work on this task has focused on the sentence as the basic unit of generation, neglecting the fact that related work sections consist of variable length text fragments derived from different information sources. As a first step toward a linguistically-motivated related work generation framework, we present a Citation Oriented Related Work Annotation (CORW A) dataset that labels different types of citation text fragments from different information sources. We train a strong baseline model that automatically tags the CORW A labels on massive unlabeled related work section texts. We further suggest a novel framework for human-in-the-loop, iterative, abstractive related work generation.

Large language models (LLMs) bring unprecedented flexibility in defining and executing complex, creative natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Yet, this flexibility brings new challenges, as it introduces new degrees of freedom in formulating the task inputs and instructions and in evaluating model performance. To facilitate the exploration of creative NLG tasks, we propose a three-component research framework that consists of systematic input manipulation, reference data, and output measurement. We use this framework to explore citation text generation -- a popular scholarly NLP task that lacks consensus on the task definition and evaluation metric and has not yet been tackled within the LLM paradigm. Our results highlight the importance of systematically investigating both task instruction and input configuration when prompting LLMs, and reveal non-trivial relationships between different evaluation metrics used for citation text generation. Additional human generation and human evaluation experiments provide new qualitative insights into the task to guide future research in citation text generation. We make our code and data publicly available.

Citation generation aims to generate a citation sentence that refers to a chosen paper in the context of a manuscript. However, a rigid citation generation process is at odds with an author's desire to control specific attributes, such as 1) the citation intent, e.g., either introducing background information or comparing results, and 2) keywords that should appear in the citation text. To provide these degrees of controllability during citation generation, we propose to integrate the manuscript context, the context of the referenced paper, and the desired control attributes into a structured template and use it to fine-tune a language model (LM) via next-token prediction. We then utilize Proximal Policy Optimization to directly optimize the LM in favor of a high score of our proposed controllability metric. The proposed workflow harmoniously combines citation attribute suggestion and conditional citation generation into one LM, allowing for better user control.

Scientific writing involves retrieving, summarizing, and citing relevant papers, which can be time-consuming processes in large and rapidly evolving fields. By making these processes inter-operable, natural language processing (NLP) provides opportunities for creating end-to-end assistive writing tools. We propose SciLit, a pipeline that automatically recommends relevant papers, extracts highlights, and suggests a reference sentence as a citation of a paper, taking into consideration the user-provided context and keywords. SciLit efficiently recommends papers from large databases of hundreds of millions of papers using a two-stage pre-fetching and re-ranking literature search system that flexibly deals with addition and removal of a paper database. We provide a convenient user interface that displays the recommended papers as extractive summaries and that offers abstractively-generated citing sentences which are aligned with the provided context and which mention the chosen keyword(s). Our assistive tool for literature discovery and scientific writing is available at https://scilit.vercel.app

Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers. Previous efforts on curating scientific TLDR datasets failed to scale up due to the heavy human annotation and domain expertise required. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to automatically extracting TLDR summaries for scientific papers from their citation texts. Based on the proposed approach, we create a new benchmark CiteSum without human annotation, which is around 30 times larger than the previous human-curated dataset SciTLDR. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of CiteSum, examining its data characteristics and establishing strong baselines. We further demonstrate the usefulness of CiteSum by adapting models pre-trained on CiteSum (named CITES) to new tasks and domains with limited supervision. For scientific extreme summarization, CITES outperforms most fully-supervised methods on SciTLDR without any fine-tuning and obtains state-of-the-art results with only 128 examples. For news extreme summarization, CITES achieves significant gains on XSum over its base model (not pre-trained on CiteSum), e.g., +7.2 ROUGE-1 zero-shot performance and state-of-the-art few-shot performance. For news headline generation, CITES performs the best among unsupervised and zero-shot methods on Gigaword. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/morningmoni/CiteSum.

Researchers and scientists increasingly find themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. Our goal is to effectively serve this need by using bibliometric text mining and summarization techniques to generate summaries of scientific literature. We show how we can use citations to produce automatically generated, readily consumable, technical extractive summaries. We first propose C-LexRank, a model for summarizing single scientific articles based on citations, which employs community detection and extracts salient information-rich sentences. Next, we further extend our experiments to summarize a set of papers, which cover the same scientific topic. We generate extractive summaries of a set of Question Answering (QA) and Dependency Parsing (DP) papers, their abstracts, and their citation sentences and show that citations have unique information amenable to creating a summary.