CiteBART: Learning to Generate Citations for Local Citation Recommendation
This addresses the problem of recommending citations for researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing generative approaches.
The paper tackles local citation recommendation by introducing CiteBART, a generative model with citation-specific pre-training, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like Refseer and ArXiv, with a macro hallucination rate of 4% at top-3 predictions.
Local citation recommendation (LCR) suggests a set of papers for a citation placeholder within a given context. The task has evolved as generative approaches have become more promising than the traditional pre-fetch and re-rank-based state-of-the-art approaches. This paper introduces citation-specific pre-training within an encoder-decoder architecture, where author-date citation tokens are masked to learn to reconstruct them to fulfill LCR. There are two variants for this pre-training. In the local context-only base scheme (CiteBART-Base), the citation token in a local context is masked to learn to predict the citation. The global version (CiteBART-Global) extends the local context with the citing paper's title and abstract to enrich the learning signal. CiteBART-Global achieves state-of-the-art performance on LCR benchmarks except for the FullTextPeerRead dataset, which is quite small to see the advantage of generative pre-training. The effect is significant in the larger benchmarks, e.g., Refseer and ArXiv., with the Refseer benchmark-trained model emerging as the best-performing model. We perform comprehensive experiments, including an ablation study, a qualitative analysis, and a taxonomy of hallucinations with detailed statistics. Our analyses confirm that CiteBART-Global has a cross-dataset generalization capability; the macro hallucination rate (MaHR) at the top-3 predictions is 4\%, and when the ground-truth is in the top-k prediction list, the hallucination tendency in the other predictions drops significantly.