4 ms·

Something similar to this already exists for citations in court decisions, where you can see if a citing decision has a positive, neutral or negative treatment.

• petschge 4y ago
  How would you treat something like "They had the right idea, but their simulation was in 2d only, and we know now that this makes the simulation results garbage. They just happened to get lucky and got garbage that matches the real thing in 3d" with that?
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Negative
  • concinds 4y ago
    Such papers would probably make it explicit that a given methodology was inadequate (and explain why) so while it may be challenging, it's still a solvable NLP problem.
• edent 4y ago
  That sounds interesting. Do you have a link? Or more details? Ta.
  • MWil 4y ago
    It's what LexisNexis / WestLaw have built their foundational businesses on - lots of $$$$. The new tech-infused player in this area is Casetext (YC13) which moved from a centralized employer-based sentiment model to a more social/open model. edit: feel free to take a look at my oldest submissions.
  • jameshart 4y ago
    Legal citations have specific ‘introductory signals’ to specify the way in which a case is being cited. Eg ‘see’ or ‘contra’ or ‘but cf’. Found a summary of one of the standards here: https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/bluebook-legal-citation/intro-signals https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/bluebook-legal-citation/intro...
• davidgay 4y ago
  The thing you are missing here is that citations are often intentionally ambiguous as to whether they are neutral or negative. Or, phrased differently, there is essentially no possible benefit for a researcher to say "this piece of related work is junk". Let the readers decide or infer instead.
  • ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    I think that's important to consider. It's kinda presumptuous to explicitly say someone is wrong. Safer to let the data speak for itself.
    • mattkrause 4y ago
      It's more nuanced than that: it may not even be obvious if someone is actually wrong. Most citations discuss related work, rather than direct replications; the latter are incredibly rare in most fields. As a result, the authors are piecing together a theory using data from many groups, each using different species, different techniques, and different conditions. Some of these might reflect legitimate differences between perfectly conducted, reasonably interpreted experiments.
  • epgui 4y ago
    They wouldn’t say it like that, but there are plenty of citations that easily fall in the bucket of negative treatment, at least in biochem, health science, environment and ecology... What you describe is a neutral treatment, and is probably the most prevalent type of citation.
• jltsiren 4y ago
  This is probably something that varies by the field, but I don't think most citations can be meaningfully placed on a positive / neutral / negative axis. When I cite something, it usually falls into one or more of the following categories: - background reading - related work - source for a specific claim / result - credit for software / data / other resource used in this work. I don't evaluate the work when I cite it. Instead, I try to provide useful information to the reader and to give credit when academic courtesy requires it.
  • epgui 4y ago
    That’s a neutral treatment then. (I’m a biochemist, and I see no reason why a similar system couldn’t apply to my field.)