Fine-grained citation span detection for references in Wikipedia

Abstract

Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, editors being encouraged to provide citations for the added content. For a Wikipedia article, determining the citation span of a citation, i.e. what content is covered by a citation, is important as it helps decide for which content citations are still missing. We are the first to address the problem of determining the citation span in Wikipedia articles. We approach this problem by classifying which textual fragments in an article are covered by a citation. We propose a sequence classification approach where for a paragraph and a citation, we determine the citation span at a fine-grained level. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation and compare our approach against baselines adopted from the scientific domain, where we show improvement for all evaluation metrics.