---
title: "Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent — Cohan 2019"
description: "The paper addresses citation intent classification: determining why a scientific paper cites another work, for example to give context, to borrow a…"
authors: ["Arman Cohan", "Waleed Ammar", "Madeleine van Zuylen", "Field Cady"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N19-1361/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/n19-1361"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cohan-2019-structural-scaffolds-citation-intent-classification/"
---
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# Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications

**Authors:** [Arman Cohan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/arman-cohan/), [Waleed Ammar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/waleed-ammar/), [Madeleine van Zuylen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/madeleine-van-zuylen/), Field Cady · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N19-1361/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N19-1361.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/n19-1361](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n19-1361) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2933655602)

**Citations:** 197 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [90](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper addresses citation intent classification: determining why a scientific paper cites another work, for example to give context, to borrow a method, or to compare findings. Earlier systems depended on hand-crafted features such as cue phrases, bootstrapped patterns and external linguistic tools. The authors instead learn representations directly from the citation context. Tokens are embedded with GloVe and ELMo, encoded by a BiLSTM and pooled with dot-product attention. On top of this shared encoder sit the main intent classifier and two auxiliary "structural scaffolds". The first predicts the title of the section where a citation appears. The second judges whether a sentence ought to contain a citation. Labels for both auxiliary tasks arise naturally when papers are written, so large training sets can be built without manual annotation. All tasks are trained jointly with weighted losses. The model sets a new state of the art on ACL-ARC. The authors also release SciCite, a larger multi-domain dataset with a coarse category scheme. The results show that cheap, freely available signals about document structure can substantially improve a task with scarce labeled data.

## Key points
- On ACL-ARC, the model reaches 67.9% macro F1, an absolute gain of 13.3 points over the feature-based system of Jurgens et al. (2018), without hand-engineered features.
- SciCite is introduced as a new dataset that is at least five times larger than earlier citation intent corpora and spans several scientific fields. It uses three intents: Background, Method and Result comparison. ACL-ARC uses six categories, including Uses, Extends, Motivation and Future work.
- Architecture: GloVe + ELMo embeddings feed a BiLSTM with attention and per-task MLP/softmax heads. Training uses balanced mini-batches across tasks, the AdaDelta optimizer, gradient clipping at 5.0, and early stopping on dev macro F1.
- Simply adding section titles as input features gave no improvement, whereas using them as an auxiliary scaffold task did help. Encoding a wider surrounding context lowered performance.
- Code and data are available at github.com/allenai/scicite. The test sets contain 139 citations (ACL-ARC) and 1,861 citations (SciCite).

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/nlp/)

## Cited by

Cited by

90 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 7 of them have a page here, 83 not yet.

- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/beltagy-2019-scibert-pretrained-language-model-scientific/)
- [TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cachola-2020-tldr-extreme-summarization-scientific-documents/)
- [SciREX: A Challenge Dataset for Document-Level Information Extraction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/jain-2020-scirex-challenge-dataset-document-level/)
- [Multi-Task Stance Detection with Sentiment and Stance Lexicons](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/li-2019-multi-task-stance-detection-sentiment/)
- [S2ORC: The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lo-2019-s2orc-semantic-scholar-open-research/)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/neumann-2019-scispacy-fast-robust-models-biomedical/)
- [Large Language Models for Citation Function Classification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/vodicka-2026-large-language-models-citation-function/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{cohan2019structural,
  title = {{Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications}},
  author = {Cohan, Arman and Ammar, Waleed and Zuylen, Madeleine van and Cady, Field},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/n19-1361},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n19-1361}
}
```

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## References

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