Multitask Learning for Citation Purpose Classification

We present our entry into the 2021 3C Shared Task Citation Context Classification based on Purpose competition. The goal of the competition is to classify a citation in a scientific article based on its purpose. This task is important because it could potentially lead to more comprehensive ways of summarizing the purpose and uses of scientific articles, but it is also difficult, mainly due to the limited amount of available training data in which the purposes of each citation have been hand-labeled, along with the subjectivity of these labels. Our entry in the competition is a multi-task model that combines multiple modules designed to handle the problem from different perspectives, including hand-generated linguistic features, TF-IDF features, and an LSTM-with-attention model. We also provide an ablation study and feature analysis whose insights could lead to future work.