Cited Text Spans for Citation Text Generation

Automatic related work generation must ground their outputs to the content of the cited papers to avoid non-factual hallucinations, but due to the length of scientific documents, existing abstractive approaches have conditioned only on the cited paper \textit{abstracts}. We demonstrate that the abstract is not always the most appropriate input for citation generation and that models trained in this way learn to hallucinate. We propose to condition instead on the \textit{cited text span} (CTS) as an alternative to the abstract. Because manual CTS annotation is extremely time- and labor-intensive, we experiment with automatic, ROUGE-based labeling of candidate CTS sentences, achieving sufficiently strong performance to substitute for expensive human annotations, and we propose a human-in-the-loop, keyword-based CTS retrieval approach that makes generating citation texts grounded in the full text of cited papers both promising and practical.