Classification of URL Citations on Scholarly Papers Using Intermediate Task Training

Citations using URL (URL citations) that appear in scholarly papers can be used as an information source for the research resource search engines. In particular, the information about the types of cited resources and reasons for their citation is crucial to describe the resources and their relations in the search services. To obtain this information, previous studies proposed some methods for classifying URL citations. However, their methods trained the model using a simple fine-tuning strategy and exhibited insufficient performance. We propose a classification method using a novel intermediate task. Our method trains the model on our intermediate task of identifying whether sample pairs belong to the same class before being fine-tuned on the target task. In the experiment, our method outperformed previous methods using the simple fine-tuning strategy with higher macro F-scores for different model sizes and architectures. Our analysis results indicate that the model learns the class boundaries of the target task by training our intermediate task. Our intermediate task also demonstrated higher performance and computational efficiency than an alternative intermediate task using triplet loss. Finally, we applied our method to other text classification tasks and confirmed the effectiveness when a simple fine-tuning strategy does not stably work.