Identifying functions of citations with CiTalO Angelo Di Iorio 1 , Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese 1,2 , and Silvio Peroni 1,2 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna (Italy) diiorio@cs.unibo.it, nuzzoles@cs.unibo.it, essepuntato@cs.unibo.it 2 STLab-ISTC Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy) Abstract. Bibliographic citation is one of the most important activities of an author in the production of any scientific work. The reasons that an author cites other publications are varied: to gain assistance of some sort, to review, critique or refute previous works, etc. In this paper we propose a tool, called CiTalO, to infer automatically the nature of cita- tions by means of Semantic Web technologies and NLP techniques. Such a characterisation makes citations more effective for linking, disseminat- ing, exploring and evaluating research. 1 Introduction Bibliographic citations are the most used tools of academic communities for linking research, for instance by connecting scientific papers to related works or sources of experimental data. Citations are also tools for disseminating, as largely discussed in [9], and exploring research, for instance providing new interfaces for browsing data. Finally, citations are useful for evaluating research, e.g. through bibliometric measures such as h-index and impact factor. All these activities can be radically improved by exploiting the actual “na- ture” of citations, i.e. the “author’s reason for citing a given paper” [11]. The mere existence of a citation, in fact, does not provide any information about the reasons the author had in mind when creating that citation to some particular document rather than to another. It is the characterization of a citation that really capture its meaning and effect. The goal of this paper is to present CiTalO, a tool that automatically anno- tates citations with properties defined in CiTO (Citation Typing Ontology) 3 [7]. These properties describe the nature of citations in scholarly works. CiTalO is implemented in Java and can be used as either stand-alone compo- nent or web service. A demo version is also available at http://wit.istc.cnr.it :8080/tools/citalo: users can use a simple HTML form to submit an English sentence containing a citation to CiTalO and to receive the list of CiTO prop- erties that characterize the nature of that citation. Multiple configurations can also be tested by using the same prototype. CiTalO exploits Semantic Web tech- nologies and NLP techniques to produce the output. The tool is designed as a chain of analysers that (i) produce ontological statements from texts, (ii) search 3 CiTO: http://purl.org/spar/cito.