Identifying Citation Sentiment and its Influence while Indexing Scientific Papers
Souvick Ghosh, Chirag Suresh Shah · Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2020
Sentiment analysis has proven to be a popular research area for analyzing social media texts, newspaper articles, and product reviews. However, sentiment analysis of citation instances is a relatively unexplored area of research. For scientific papers, it is often assumed that the sentiment associated with citation instances is inherently positive. This assumption is due to the hedged nature of sentiment in citations, which is difficult to identify and classify. As a result, most of the existing indexes focus only on the frequency of citation. In this paper, we highlight the importance of considering the sentiment of citation while preparing ranking indexes for scientific literature. We perform automatic sentiment classification of citation instances on the ACL Anthology collection of papers. Next, we use the sentiment score in addition to the frequency of citation to build a ranking index for this collection of scientific papers. By using various baselines, we highlight the impact of our index on the ACL Anthology collection of papers. Our research contributes toward building more sentiment sensitive ranking index which better underlines the influence and usefulness of research papers.