NeuSub: A Neural Submodular Approach for Citation Recommendation

Citation recommendation is a task that aims to automatically select suitable references for a working manuscript. This task has become increasingly urgent as the typical pools of candidates continue to grow, in the order of tens or hundreds of thousands or more. While several approaches to citation recommendation have been proposed in the literature, they generally seem to lack principled mechanisms to ensure diversity and other global properties among the recommended citations. For this reason, in this paper we propose a novel citation recommendation approach that leverages a submodular scoring function and a deep document representation to achieve an effective trade-off between relevance to the query and diversity of the references. To optimally train the scoring function and the deep representation, we propose a novel training objective based on a structural/multiclass hinge loss and incremental recommendations. The experimental results over three popular citation datasets have showed that the proposed approach has led to remarkable accuracy improvements, with an increase of up to 1.91 pp of MRR and 3.29 pp of F1@100 score with respect to a state-of-the-art citation recommendation system.