Citation Context and Sentiment Analysis

Citation function is the rhetorical role of a citation — for example using a cited method, comparing or contrasting results, acknowledging a basis, or neutral background reference — as defined by Teufel and colleagues' annotation scheme. Citation sentiment is the evaluative stance of the citing author toward the cited work — positive, neutral, or negative — as studied by Athar. They are related but distinct: a contrast citation, for instance, may or may not carry negative sentiment, and many neutral-function citations carry no sentiment at all.

Citation sentiment is overwhelmingly neutral, so the interesting positive and negative classes are rare and the data are highly imbalanced. Scholarly authors also express criticism indirectly and politely, often through hedging or implicit comparison rather than overt negative words, and a single sentence may cite several works with different stances. Athar's use of sentence-structure features and explicit negation handling was motivated precisely by these difficulties, which make naive bag-of-words sentiment methods unreliable on citations.

You need the full text, or at least the citation sentences (citances), because the function and sentiment signals live in the words around each citation, not in bibliographic metadata. This is the main practical constraint: open-access corpora and parsed full-text collections such as those from S2ORC or arXiv enable the analysis, while citation databases that expose only counts and edges do not. Accurate extraction of the citation context from PDF or XML is therefore the first and often hardest engineering step.