Citances: Citation Sentences for Semantic Analysis of Bioscience Text

We propose the use of the text of the sentences surrounding citations as an important tool for semantic interpretation of bioscience text. We hypothesize several different uses of citation sentences (which we call citances), including the creation of training and testing data for semantic analysis (especially for entity and relation recognition), synonym set creation, database curation, document summarization, and information retrieval generally. We illustrate some of these ideas, showing that citations to one document in particular align well with what a hand-built curator extracted. We also show preliminary results on the problem of normalizing the different ways that the same concepts are expressed within a set of citances, using and improving on existing techniques in automatic paraphrase generation.