Fine Grained Citation Span for References in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for identifying the exact text segments in Wikipedia articles that are supported by specific citations, enhancing verifiability and completeness of references.

Contribution

It is the first to address the problem of determining citation spans in Wikipedia, proposing a sequence classification approach for fine-grained citation coverage detection.

Findings

Improved citation span detection accuracy over baselines

Effective fine-grained classification of citation coverage

Enhanced verifiability in Wikipedia articles

Abstract

\emph{Verifiability} is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, editors being encouraged to provide citations for the added content. For a Wikipedia article, determining the \emph{citation span} of a citation, i.e. what content is covered by a citation, is important as it helps decide for which content citations are still missing. We are the first to address the problem of determining the \emph{citation span} in Wikipedia articles. We approach this problem by classifying which textual fragments in an article are covered by a citation. We propose a sequence classification approach where for a paragraph and a citation, we determine the citation span at a fine-grained level. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation and compare our approach against baselines adopted from the scientific domain, where we show improvement for all evaluation metrics.