Identifying citing sentences in research papers using supervised learning

Researchers have largely focused on analyzing citation links from one scholarly work to another. Such citing sentences are an important part of the narrative in a research article. If we can automatically identify such sentences, we can devise an editor that helps suggest when a particular piece of text needs to be backed up with a citation or not. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying citing sentences by constructing a classifier using supervised learning. Our experiments show that simple language features such as proper nouns and the labels of previous and next sentences are effective features to identifying citing sentences.