CiteBench: A benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation

TL;DR

CiteBench is a comprehensive benchmark that unifies various datasets to evaluate and advance scientific citation text generation models, facilitating systematic research and comparison across different task settings and domains.

Contribution

The paper introduces CiteBench, a standardized benchmark for citation text generation that consolidates multiple datasets and provides a framework for consistent evaluation.

Findings

Strong baseline performances analyzed

Transferability of models across datasets tested

Insights into task design and evaluation provided

Abstract

Science progresses by building upon the prior body of knowledge documented in scientific publications. The acceleration of research makes it hard to stay up-to-date with the recent developments and to summarize the ever-growing body of prior work. To address this, the task of citation text generation aims to produce accurate textual summaries given a set of papers-to-cite and the citing paper context. Due to otherwise rare explicit anchoring of cited documents in the citing paper, citation text generation provides an excellent opportunity to study how humans aggregate and synthesize textual knowledge from sources. Yet, existing studies are based upon widely diverging task definitions, which makes it hard to study this task systematically. To address this challenge, we propose CiteBench: a benchmark for citation text generation that unifies multiple diverse datasets and enables standardized evaluation of citation text generation models across task designs and domains. Using the new benchmark, we investigate the performance of multiple strong baselines, test their transferability between the datasets, and deliver new insights into the task definition and evaluation to guide future research in citation text generation. We make the code for CiteBench publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/citebench.