Text genres in information organization

Introduction. Text genres used by so-called information organizers in the processes of information organization in information systems were explored in this research. Method. The research employed text genre socio-functional analysis. Five genre groups in information organization were distinguished. Every genre group used in information organization is described. Empirical evidence for genre group two was obtained through specific analysis of genres used by cataloguers cooperating within the Polish union catalogue. Analysis. A qualitative genre analysis concerning the choice and description of five groups of genres most important for information organization was carried out. Most attention was paid to the second group of text genres, consisting of vocabularies and rules used in cataloguing. Results. The text genre system used in information organization and showing the roles of any specified text genre group is described. The case of the Polish union catalogue database helped to present temporo-spatial dependencies appearing in the regulated genre system. Conclusions. Information organization involves the creation of representations of published texts with a variety of text tools. The creation of these texts and their use (reading) results in individual knowledge reorganization (modification) of all people involved in these processes, that is both writers (including authors of vocabularies, cataloguing rules and bibliographic records) and readers

A role for genre-based pedagogy in academic writing instruction?: an EAP perspective

In this paper I discuss the use of genre as a theoretical construct in academic writing instruction in the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. I begin by considering the notion of discourse competence as a concept that accounts for the knowledge elements and skills employed by expert academic writers, and then consider genre as a way of operationalizing the different elements of discourse competence knowledge for the purpose of writing instruction. I review briefly the diversity of approaches to theorizing genre knowledge, and then present the dual social genre/cognitive genre approach that I have used as a basis for research and course design in an EAP context. I exemplify this model by summarizing the key elements of two studies of research genres in which I have used this model. I conclude with a brief theoretical discussion of the issue of construct validity in relation to using the concept of genre in research that relates to writing instruction

Predicting Text Quality: Metrics for Content, Organization and Reader Interest

When people read articles---news, fiction or technical---most of the time if not always, they form perceptions about its quality. Some articles are well-written and others are poorly written. This thesis explores if such judgements can be automated so that they can be incorporated into applications such as information retrieval and automatic summarization. Text quality does not involve a single aspect but is a combination of numerous and diverse criteria including spelling, grammar, organization, informative nature, creative and beautiful language use, and page layout. In the education domain, comprehensive lists of such properties are outlined in the rubrics used for assessing writing. But computational methods for text quality have addressed only a handful of these aspects, mainly related to spelling, grammar and organization. In addition, some text quality aspects could be more relevant for one genre versus another. But previous work have placed little focus on specialized metrics based on the genre of texts. This thesis proposes new insights and techniques to address the above issues. We introduce metrics that score varied dimensions of quality such as content, organization and reader interest. For content, we present two measures: specificity and verbosity level. Specificity measures the amount of detail present in a text while verbosity captures which details are essential to include. We measure organization quality by quantifying the regularity of the intentional structure in the article and also using the specificity levels of adjacent sentences in the text. Our reader interest metrics aim to identify engaging and interesting articles. The development of these measures is backed by the use of articles from three different genres: academic writing, science journalism and automatically generated summaries. Proper presentation of content is critical during summarization because summaries have a word limit. Our specificity and verbosity metrics are developed with this genre as the focus. The argumentation structure of academic writing lends support to the idea of using intentional structure to model organization quality. Science journalism articles convey research findings in an engaging manner and are ideally suited for the development and evaluation of measures related to reader interest