Building a Synthetic Biomedical Research Article Citation Linkage Corpus

Citations are frequently used in publications to support the presented results and to demonstrate the previous discoveries while also assisting the reader in following the chronological progression of information through publications. In scientific publications, a citation refers to the referenced document, but it makes no mention of the exact span of text that is being referred to. Connecting the citation to this span of text is called citation linkage. In this paper, to find these citation linkages in biomedical research publications using deep learning, we provide a synthetic silver standard corpus as well as the method to build this corpus. The motivation for building this corpus is to provide a training set for deep learning models that will locate the text spans in a reference article, given a citing statement, based on semantic similarity. This corpus is composed of sentence pairs, where one sentence in each pair is the citing statement and the other one is a candidate cited statement from the referenced paper. The corpus is annotated using an unsupervised sentence embedding method. The effectiveness of this silver standard corpus for training citation linkage models is validated against a human-annotated gold standard corpus.