FineCite: A Novel Approach For Fine-Grained Citation Context Analysis

Lasse M. Jantsch, Dong-Jae Koh, Seonghwan Yoon, Jisu Lee, Anne Lauscher, Young-Kyoon Suh


Abstract
Citation context analysis (CCA) is a field of research studying the role and purpose of citation in scientific discourse. While most of the efforts in CCA have been focused on elaborate characterization schemata to assign function or intent labels to individual citations, the citation context as the basis for such a classification has received rather limited attention. This relative neglect, however, has led to the prevalence of vague definitions and restrictive assumptions, limiting the citation context in its expressiveness. It is a common practice, for example, to restrict the context to the citing sentence. While this simple context conceptualization might be sufficient to assign intent or function classes, it fails to cover the rich information of scientific discourse. To address this concern, we analyze the context conceptualizations of previous works and, to our knowledge, construct the first comprehensive context definition based on the semantic properties of the citing text. To evaluate this definition, we construct and publish the FineCite corpus containing 1,056 manually annotated citation contexts. Our experiments on established CCA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our fine-grained context definition, showing improvements of up to 25% compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We make our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/lab-paper-code/FineCite.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1259
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24525–24542
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1259/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lasse M. Jantsch, Dong-Jae Koh, Seonghwan Yoon, Jisu Lee, Anne Lauscher, and Young-Kyoon Suh. 2025. FineCite: A Novel Approach For Fine-Grained Citation Context Analysis. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 24525–24542, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FineCite: A Novel Approach For Fine-Grained Citation Context Analysis (Jantsch et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1259.pdf