Citation sentences (citances) to a reference article have been extensively studied for summarization tasks. However, citances might not accurately represent the content of the cited article, as they often fail to capture the context of the reported findings and can be affected by epistemic value drift. Following the intuition behind the TAC (Text Analysis Conference) 2014 Biomedical Summarization track, we propose a system that identifies text spans in the reference article that are related to a given citance. We refer to this problem as citance-reference spans matching. We approach the problem as a retrieval task; in this paper, we detail a comparison of different citance reformulation methods and their combinations. While our results show improvement over the baseline (up to 25.9%), their absolute magnitude implies that there is ample room for future improvement.
['Arman Cohan', 'Luca Soldaini', 'Nazli Goharian']
Matching Citation Text and Cited Spans in Biomedical Literature: a Search-Oriented Approach