Citations are a feature of academic literature. Writers cite other researchers' works which are related in some way to their discussion.

Citations and the sentences containing them may be able to tell us useful things about the cited and citing documents, the relationship between the research reported in them, the relationship between the researchers, and many other things.

Because citing sentences are potentially a rich source of information, they are an interesting target for natural language processing research. I am developing techniques to extract and analyze citations, and building applications based on this. In particular, I am interested in determining the semantics of citing sentences based on analysis of their content, grammatical structure, discourse role, and context.

If you're interested in getting an idea of what work has been done in this area, you can see a fairly comprehensive bibliography of work related to citation analysis.

More information on my research will appear here in the coming months.