Writing Abstracts: Technological Applications from a Corpus-Based Study

Paper (RP), have often been analyzed in order to observe how information has been rendered for translation or contrastive analysis purposes. However, in this genre, as in many others, “while there is a wealth of descriptive research, generally speaking, the information is not directly amenable to applied endevours” (Rabadán, 2008: 103). The aim of this paper was to describe the methodology and the tools devised by the ACTRES research group to bridge the transition between linguistic description and procedural information. The first step of this process was to design a small special corpus of scientific abstracts, the BioAbstracts_C-ACTRES. The macro and microlinguistic characteristics of this corpus were analyzed in order to find the most prototypical rhetorical, grammatical and lexical features of this genre. Then, we identified the “anchors” (Rabadán: in press) relevant for the native speakers of Spanish. Finally, a prototype of a writing application, the Scientific_Abstract_Generator, has been designed. Still under development, it aims at helping native Spanish users who are non-linguist field experts, to write scientific abstracts in English

Trends in genre analysis articles on scientific abstract structures: A Quantitative content analysis

Genre analysis is a methodologically prominent approach to segmenting a scientific abstract into discourse units. Genre analysis studies on scientific abstract structures have valuable outputs not only for secondary information services, including bibliographic databases and online services but also for scientific communication and library and information science (LIS) education. However, trends of research on this topic have not been investigated yet. This study identifies research trends and reveals knowledge gaps and research opportunities in genre analysis articles on scientific abstracts. For this purpose, Web of Science and Scopus databases were searched to identify the articles. According to the study selection criteria, 75 articles were included in the quantitative content analysis. It was found that the most frequently studied genres were research articles (73.3%), proceedings (%12), and thesis/dissertations (8%). The sample size of the corpus ranged from 5 to 4214 abstracts (M = 223.8, MD = 94, SD = 523.8). The authors most frequently cited for abstract genre models were Hyland, Swales, and Santos, respectively. In 18.7% of articles, at least one of the abstract standards was cited. Approximately, two-thirds of the articles were comparative. Languages (44.7%), disciplines (25.5%), genres, and native/non-native authors (8.5%) were compared most frequently. English was the most frequently studied language, both individual (72.4%) and comparatively (25.9%). The results of this study suggest that the LIS community, as well as applied linguistics, can seize the opportunity to address gaps in academic genres, disciplines, and languages. In addition, future studies are expected to have generalizable results to assist the scientific communication and LIS communities

Análisis contrastivo inglés-ruso de resúmenes de artículos de investigación del ámbito de geociencias

Un buen dominio del género textual del Resumen resulta fundamental para satisfacer las expectativas de la comunidad científica. Hasta la fecha ya contamos con diferentes investigaciones sobre este género en diversas disciplinas, si bien el Resumen en el ámbito de geociencias ha sido menos estudiado. Por otro lado, el enfoque adoptado en la mayoría de esos estudios se basa en las dicotomías nativo/no nativo. No obstante, el análisis de los resúmenes escritos por rusohablantes todavía presenta un campo de investigación poco explorado. El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo llevar a cabo una comparación lingüística de resúmenes escritos en inglés por geocientíficos noveles rusos, por un lado, y por expertos ingleses nativos, por el otro. Para ello se ha recopilado un corpus de resúmenes geocientíficos en inglés. El análisis multidimensional del corpus generalmente confirma los estudios previos sobre el tema, sin embargo, ha mostrado unas características diferentes en los resúmenes rusos.Mastering the genre of the research article abstract is crucially important to meet the expectations of a discourse community in a particular scientific field. To date, research has shed light on how abstracts are written in various disciplines. However, few if any attempts have been made to analyse the abstract in geoscience. Furthermore, several studies have investigated the genre of abstract drawing on native/non-native, expert/apprentice dichotomies. Even so, there has not been sufficient investigation into abstracts written by Russian native speakers. This study therefore aims to carry out a cross-linguistic comparison of abstracts written in English by Russian novice researchers and native English-speaking experts in geoscience. For this purpose, a monolingual English corpus of research articles in geoscience was created. The results of Biber’s multidimensional analysis generally confirm previous findings about abstracts in hard sciences, though they allow for hypotheses on some distinctive features of abstracts written by Russian geoscientists

A estrutura interna do gênero abstract de artigo científico: um estudo sobre a possibilidade de subtipos da sequência descritiva de adam

The concept of genre has become fundamental, particularly for the purposes of teaching reading and written production. In Brazil, this line of research has presented a common focus: the perspective of intervention in education issues, either immediately or prospectively (MACHADO, 2005). This study focuses on the characterization of genres as teaching tools and aims to analyze the sequential organization of abstracts of scientific articles, as proposed in Machado (1996). The theoreticalphilosophical perspectives which guided the study are mainly Bakhtin’s Enunciation Theory (1992; 1997) and the Socio-Discursive Interactionism (BRONCKART, 2003). Based on Adam’s concept of sequence, Machado poses a hypothesis according to which the sequential organization of texts belonging to the critical review genre (which includes articles’ abstracts) would be organized by descriptive sequences, as subtypes of Adam’s Descriptive Sequence. Thus, a number of abstracts were here selected and analyzed in an attempt to identify, in their sequential organization, such subtypes of sequences suggested. The analysis showed that the characterization of these texts’ internal structure fundamentally depends on the acknowledgment of the genre to which they belong. This perception, which recognizes these language actions (texts) as abstracts of scientific articles – texts approximately 300 words-long, published in journals, immediately previous to their articles – generates expectations regarding their internal structure and, only then, it is possible to realize them as texts organized into the subtype: Text-Descriptive Sequence

There are differences between scientific and non-scientific English indeed: a case study

[Abstracts] This study considers the behaviour of one specific stance adverb, indeed. In a previous analysis of scientific texts, indeed was found to be one of the most frequently used adverbs in the expression of emphatic standpoint evincing authorial presence (Moskowich and Crespo 2014). Also noted was its differing use by male and female writers, as well as differences according to genre and the geographical provenance of authors. My aim in the present study is to see whether such behaviour of indeed is also found in non-scientific texts, and if so to what extent. The analysis will include both scientific and non-scientific texts from the nineteenth century, a period in which the general fixation of English in its contemporary form had already taken place. The initial hypothesis is that authors of scientific texts tended to express themselves with more caution, even tentativeness, in comparison to authors writing less “impersonal” texts. External factors might also lead to identifiable variations in use in scientific writing, these including the sex of the speaker, plus his or her self-confidence as a writer. Such factors will be used as variables in the analysis. Data for scientific writing will be drawn from the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA) and the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET); the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE) will be used for non-scientific texts

The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles, particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined. To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000 words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric) approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since the previous edition of the handbook.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Machine Learning of Generic and User-Focused Summarization

A key problem in text summarization is finding a salience function which determines what information in the source should be included in the summary. This paper describes the use of machine learning on a training corpus of documents and their abstracts to discover salience functions which describe what combination of features is optimal for a given summarization task. The method addresses both "generic" and user-focused summaries.Comment: In Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on AI (AAAI-98), p. 821-82

Análise das estratégias de tradução de cem resumos/abstracts da revista Delta (segundo Chesterman 1997)

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós Graduação em Estudos da TraduçãoA presente dissertação, vinculada à Crítica da Tradução e à Lingüística de Corpus, tem como objetivo analisar as estratégias de tradução empregadas em resumos/abstracts de artigos científicos das áreas da Lingüística e Estudos da Tradução. Apresenta como referenciais teóricos noções de: comunidade discursiva, análise de gênero, padrão retórico do discurso científico, análise de registro, funções da linguagem, ideologia, estudos da tradução, equivalência, unidade de tradução e estratégias de tradução. A análise foi realizada manualmente num corpus de 100 (cem) resumos com seus respectivos abstracts coletados online na revista DELTA (Revista de Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada), publicada pela PUC de São Paulo. Para a identificação das estratégias de tradução empregadas nestes textos, adotou-se a classificação proposta por Chesterman (1997). A ocorrência das estratégias mostrada em tabelas estatísticas e gráficos revela a tendência para a qual a tradução deste gênero neste par de línguas se inclina, e permite fazer generalizações sobre os aspectos que permeiam a tradução do discurso científico. The present thesis, inserted in the research area of Translation Criticism and Corpus Linguistics, aims at analyzing the translation strategies used in research articles abstracts of Linguistics and Translation Studies. It presents some theoretical background on discourse community, genre analysis, rhetorical patterns of scientific discourse, register analysis, language functions, ideology, translation studies, equivalence, translation units and translation strategies. The analysis was carried out manually in 100 (one hundred) abstracts translated from Portuguese taken from a scientific journal on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Studies called DELTA, published by PUC-São Paulo, a Brazilian Catholic University. For the identification of the translation strategies used in these texts, the classification proposed by Chesterman (1997) was adopted. The occurrence of strategies shown in statistical tables reveals the inclination of the translation of this genre in this pair of languages, as well as allows for generalizations on the features of translation of scientific discourse