Do "Future Work" sections have a purpose? Citation links and entailment for global scientometric questions

Which tasks in digital libraries might be interesting and addressable for us as a community now in the near future, given the recent developments in NLP? This paper attempts to make a guess. (Instead of actually even attempting to answer the question in its title.) What would we need to do today if we, at some point in the future, wanted to be able to answer this question objectively, quantifiably, and on a large text base? Many similar questions in the same vein exist, such as where the research of a field as a whole is headed, where the currently most contested research issues in a field are, which new ideas emerged in the past 5 years, and which ones of these are game-changers. I will argue that we might well be able to offer support for the answering of such questions sometime in the future, particularly if we are willing to turn our attention to entailment and inference in scientific writing.