Disciplinary Difference in Citation Opinion Expressions

Abstract

This study examines academic opinion expressions in citation context. We first developed an annotation schema to annotate three aspects of each academic opinion expressed in a citation statement: rhetorical purpose, content aspect, and opinion polarity. We then annotated two samples: a natural science sample consisting of biomedical journal articles, and an engineering sample consisting of conference papers in the natural language processing field. A comparison of the annotations on the two samples showed disciplinary differences in citation opinion expressions. The result contributes to the understanding of academic opinion expressions in citation context and the development of automated citation opinion analysis tools to assist researchers' literature search and navigation.