Tzu-Kun Hsiao’s Preliminary Examination
PhD student Tzu-Kun Hsiao will present her dissertation proposal defense, “Semantic Citation: Mentions of Knowledge in Citation Contexts.” Tzu-Kun’s preliminary exam committee includes Associate Professor Vetle I. Torvik, chair; Associate Professor Jodi Schneider; Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu; Assistant Professor Matthew Turk.
Abstract: Citations connect the past and the present. When authors reference prior research, they describe, discuss, or critique the referenced work in written text. These text passages, known as citation contexts, can enrich these past-to- present connections with semantics (i.e., the meaning of sentences containing citations). By investigating citation contexts, we can gain insights into the reasons behind citations (i.e., citation purposes), the opinions of citing authors toward the cited articles (i.e., citation sentiments), and the specific knowledge being referenced (e.g., findings or methods). However, it is challenging to obtain high-quality citation context data, even though millions of full-text scientific articles are freely available. This dissertation addresses this challenge and investigates the semantics of citations with three different thrusts: The first thrust addresses the practical but non-trivial issues of identifying citation contexts from a large collection of scientific articles. The second thrust investigates the semantics of citation contexts mentioning retracted articles using content analysis and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The third thrust presents a generalized analysis of citation contexts from the perspective of semantic diversity using pre-trained sentence embeddings.
Questions? Contact Tzu-Kun Hsiao.