Automatic generation of related work through summarizing citations

Related work is a component of a scientific paper, which introduces other researchers' relevant works and makes comparisons with the current author's work. Automatically generating the related work section of a writing paper provides a tool for researchers to accomplish the related work section efficiently without missing related works. This paper proposes an approach to automatically generating a related work section by comparing the main text of the paper being written with the citations of other papers that cite the same references. Our approach first collects the papers that cite the reference papers of the paper being written and extracts the corresponding citation sentences to form a citation document. It then extracts keywords from the citation document and the paper being written and constructs a graph of the keywords. Once the keywords that discriminate the two documents are determined, the minimum Steiner tree that covers the discriminative keywords and the topic keywords is generated. The summary is generated by extracting the sentences covering the Steiner tree. According to ROUGE evaluations, the experiments show that the citations are suitable for related work generation and our approach outperforms the three baseline methods of MEAD, LexRank, and ReWoS. This work verifies the general summarization method based on connotation and extension through citation.