A Term Importance-based Approach to Identifying Core Citations in Computational Linguistics Articles

Core citation recognition is to identify influential ones among the prior articles that a scholarly article cite. Previous approaches have employed citing-text occurrence information, textual similarities between citing and cited article, etc. This study proposes a term-based approach to core citation recognition, which exploits the importance of individual terms appearing in in-text citation to calculate influence-strength for each cited article. Term importance is computed using various frequency information such as term frequency(tf) in in-text citation, tf in the citing article, inverse sentence frequency in the citing article, inverse document frequency in a collection of articles. Experiments using a previous test set consisting of computational linguistics articles show that the term-based approach performs comparably with the previous approaches. The proposed technique could be easily extended by employing other term units such as n-grams and phrases, or by using new term-importance formulae.