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

The Rhetorical Moves and Verb Tense in Research Article Abstracts

Abstract: This study aims to examine the rhetorical moves and explore the use of verb tense in research article abstracts This study employs corpus based approach using a corpus toolkit AntConc 3.2.4w. The subjects of this study are 29 research articles. The findings reveal that the preferred rhetorical moves of the abstracts are Move 2-purpose, Move 3-method, and Move 4-result. The use of present tense is dominant in all five moves. Additionally, past tense is mostly found in method move. In this case, the writers employ the preferred rhetorical move and different verb tense in each move to emphasize the writer’s objectiveness. Key Words: rhetorical move, verb tense, research article abstractsAbstrak: Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui rhetorical moves dan penggunaan kata kerja pada abstrak artikel penelitian. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian korpus dengan menggunakan perangkat korpus bernama AntConc 3.2.4w. Subyek penelitian ini merupakan 29 artikel penelitian. Hasil dari penelitian tersebut menunjukkann bahwa penulis lebih memilih menggunakan Move 2-purpose, Move 3-method, dan Move 4-result dalam penulisan abstrak. Penggunakan kata kerja present merupakan kata kerja yang paling banyak dan sering digunakan pada kelima moves. Selain itu, kata kerja lampau merupakan kata kerja yang paling banyak digunakan dalam method move. Dalam hal ini, penulis menggunakan beberapa rhetorical move pilihan mereka dan juga kata kerja yang berbeda untuk menekankan keobjektifan mereka. Kata kunci: rhetorical move, kata kerja, abstrak artikel penelitia

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

Revealing the rhetorical moves and linguistic patterns in discipline-related undergraduate thesis

Previous studies have provided exciting findings for language variations in theses and dissertations. However, not many studies have revealed the rhetorical analysis of the undergraduate abstracts. This study investigated the rhetorical structure of undergraduate thesis abstracts to reveal the constructions of the genre by novice writers. It further explored the variations between two groups of writers, students with the native language of English and Indonesian students writing in English. The aim was to present the commonalities and differences within the genre and finally conclude the genre’s conventions. The corpus for this study consisted of 180 undergraduate thesis abstracts from 12 universities in the United States, New Zealand, and Indonesia from Computer Science. The findings of this study revealed certain conventions consisting of rhetorical moves and rhetorical strategies used to perform the rhetorical moves. Differences between native writers of English and non-native writers of English included the use of lexical items and lexico-grammatical constructions in presenting arguments and evidence. The study concluded that socio-cultural factors, such as institutional guidelines for thesis writing and students’ first language, may contribute to the genre's variations

MOVE STRUCTURES AND THEIR RHETORICAL VERBS OF RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS ACROSS ENGLISHES

Genre-based studies on moves structure of research article (RA) abstracts have established variations across cultures. However, previous studies included at most two countries for comparisons of abstracts written by native against non-native speakers. With the advent of World Englishes, it is deemed more practical to examine abstracts across Englishes to determine the writing conventions of the L1, L2 and EFL speakers of English. Consequently, the present study is a structural move analysis of RA abstracts focusing on the macro-structural moves across the Englishes and the lexical verbs employed used in each move. It examined 36 RA abstracts from linguistics and language and education fields, consisting of 12 abstracts each from the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles of English by Kachru (1992). Each abstract was segmented into moves using the Five-Move Model of Santos (1996), which includes moves: (1) Situating the Research (STR); (2) Presenting the Research (PTR); (3) Discussing the Methodology (DTM); (4) Summarizing the Findings, (STF), and (5) Discussing the Research (DTR). The study found that the Inner Circle of English has the structure: Abstract à (STR) + PTR + DTM + (STF) + (DTR). The Outer Circle has the structure: Abstract à (STR) + PTR + (DTM) + STF + DTR. The Expanding Circle has the structure: Abstract à (STR) + PTR + DTM + (STF) + (DTR). The formulaic structures of abstract moves revealed that the only common move across Englishes is PTR. Following the approach of Musa et al. (2015), the lexical verbs realizing the purpose of each of the rhetorical moves were listed in order to come up with lists of rhetorical verbs which can be used in structuring an RA abstract. The study concludes with implications for academic writing instruction that calls for future abstract analyses that are world Englishes-inspired

Różnice międzykulturowe streszczeń artykułów naukowych pochodzących z różnych społeczności dyskursu

Artykuł recenzowany / peer-reviewed articleGlobalizacja świata akademickiego spowodowała, iż angielski stał się głównym językiem komunikacji naukowej. W konsekwencji język ten jest dla naukowców narzędziem prezentowania ich osiągnięć oraz zdobywania uznania na arenie międzynarodowej, co jest niezbędne dla rozwoju ich kariery zawodowej. Gatunkiem odgrywającym kluczową rolę w dzieleniu się wiedzą wśród naukowców jest streszczenie artykułu naukowego. Jest to pierwsza po tytule część artykułu, którą napotykają czytelnicy i która wpływa na ich decyzję o tym, czy artykuł wart jest przeczytania – a także na decyzję wydawców czasopism, czy wart jest upublicznienia. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie międzykulturowej analizy porównawczej struktury retorycznej, funkcji językowych oraz aspektów promocyjnych streszczeń artykułów naukowych. Badanie opiera się na specjalistycznym korpusie językowym, obejmującym 60 streszczeń artykułów naukowych w języku angielskim napisanych przez uczonych z dwóch różnych kręgów kulturowych i językowych, tj. przez native speakerów i non-native speakerów (autorów polskich). Analiza streszczeń, oparta na modelu analizy retorycznych kroków w dyskursie, proponowanym przez Swalesa i Feak (2009) oraz modelu metadyskursu Hylanda (2005), wykazała: 1) podobieństwa i różnice w liczbie, rodzaju i sekwencji retorycznych kroków oraz ich struktury; 2) wpływ konwencji dyskursu akademickiego na wybór struktur gramatycznych, słownictwa i stylu streszczeń napisanych przez wyżej wymienionych autorów. Oczekuje się, że wyniki tej analizy pomogą w przygotowywaniu materiałów dydaktycznych mających na celu ułatwienie zrozumienia konwencji dotyczących struktury i stylu streszczenia artykułu naukowego

Rhetorical Patterns, Verb Tense, and Voice in Cross Disciplinary Research Article Abstract

This article investigates research article abstracts in terms of their rhetorical patterns and the use of verb tenses and voice. A total of 40 abstracts were selected from four International journals in the fields of Biology, Mechanical Engineering, Linguistics, and Medicine. A four move model was adopted from Hardjanto (1997) to analyze the structure of the abstracts. The results show that all the abstracts have Move 1, creating a research space; 70% have Move 2, describing research procedure; 85% have Move 3, summarizing principal results; and 85% have Move 4, evaluating results. All the abstracts in medicine have Moves 1, 2, 3 and 4, whereas the most common pattern in Biology is Moves 1, 3 and 4, in Mechanical Engineering Moves 1, 2 and 3, and in Linguistics Moves 1, 2 and 4. This seems to suggest that there is a disciplinary variation in the structuring of RA abstracts in the four disciplines under investigation. With regard to the use of verb tense and voice in each move, the present tense and past tense in the active voice and the past tense in the passive voice were the most frequently used tenses. The present tense in the active voice was frequently used in Moves 1 and 4, while the past tense in the active voice was commonly used in Move 3 and the past tense in the passive voice was frequently found in Move 2. Furthermore, it was found that the present tense in the active voice was frequently used in Biology, Mechanical Engineering and Linguistics, whereas the past tense in the active voice occurred more frequently in Medicine, and the past tense in the passive voice was more frequently found in Mechanical Engineering than in other disciplines

Analysis of Abstracts in Scientific Papers Written in English Using Corpora

Research article abstracts are the gateways to communicate the research findings. This function and the significant contribution in disseminating the knowledge production have been the issue of academic research studies across disciplines. Abstracts, indeed, after titles, are the most read section freely available online. However, despite the impressive output contribution to the academic discourse community, both national and international and much research developed on abstracts, investigations particularly contrasting article abstracts published in Ecuadorian and North-American journals are scarce. The study examines the rhetorical organization and the linguistic realizations of abstract written in four disciplines, by first identifying the move structure and then their linguistic realizations, including verb tense, clauses, modals and stance markers. The contrastive analysis of English and Spanish texts is based on a corpus of 120 abstracts from the fields of humanities and science. Results showed that abstract published in Ecuadorian and North-American journals from four disciplines do put more emphasis on purpose, method, and product (results) in order to introduce the new knowledge. Throughout the corpus present, past tense, and hedges were the most frequent categories. The present tense commonly occurred in M1-M2-M5. The similarities and differences in the rhetorical organization and linguistic realizations of abstract moves might be attributed to the context of publication; however, such rhetorical and style choices remain quite unclear, in terms of conventional patterns or authors’ preferences