Taxonomy Tree Generation from Citation Graph

Abstract: Constructing taxonomies from citation graphs is essential for organizing scientific knowledge, facilitating literature reviews, and identifying emerging research trends. However, manual taxonomy construction is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human biases, often overlooking pivotal but less-cited papers. In this paper, to enable automatic hierarchical taxonomy generation from citation graphs, we propose HiGTL (Hierarchical Graph Taxonomy Learning), a novel end-to-end framework guided by human-provided instructions or preferred topics. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical citation graph clustering method that recursively groups related papers based on both textual content and citation structure, ensuring semantically meaningful and structurally coherent clusters. Additionally, we develop a novel taxonomy node verbalization strategy that iteratively generates central concepts for each cluster, leveraging a pre-trained LLM to maintain semantic consistency across hierarchical levels. To further enhance performance, we design a joint optimization framework that fine-tunes both the clustering and concept generation modules, aligning structural accuracy with the quality of generated taxonomies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiGTL effectively produces coherent, high-quality taxonomies.