Citation Worthiness of Sentences in Scientific Reports

Does this sentence need citation? In this paper, we introduce the task of citation worthiness for scientific texts at a sentence-level granularity. The task is to detect whether a sentence in a scientific article needs to be cited or not. It can be incorporated into citation recommendation systems to help automate the citation process by marking sentences where needed. It may also be useful for publishers to regularize the citation process. We construct a dataset using the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus; consisting of over 1.1M "not_cite" and 85K "cite" sentences. We study the performance of a set of state-of-the-art sentence classifiers for the citation worthiness task and show the practical challenges. We also explore sectionwise difficulty of the task and analyze the performance of our best model on a published article.