RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES: THE CASE FOR ARGUMENTATIONAL ANALYSIS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

In this paper the extent to which modern indexing and information retrieval research meets the needs and requirements of different types of readers is criticised. A review of the stagnation in this field gives evidence for the need for a radically different approach. The main problem is identified as the assumption that knowledge contained in a scientific article can be represented by a semantic network only, a nd therefore can be manipulated b y formal lo gic approaches. Complementary to this, a plea is made to start a n a rgumentational anal ysis o f t he - h ighly structured - corpus of scientific articles (mainly in physics). Such an analysis might lead to an argumentational syntax which will also enable the non-expert to browse through large quantities of electronically stored articles. A first attempt at such an approach is given. Furthermore the possible use of the Standard Gene ral Markup Language (SGML ) appr oach in r elation to a hypertext environment for a possible application is discussed. THIS ARTICLE DEALS with the problems of automated bibliographic and full text storage of scientific articles. A critical review is given of the stagnation in the field of information retrieval (IR), and a new approach, complementary to existing semantic methods, is suggested. With the ever increasing number of scientific papers published per year, automated indexing, storage and retrieval systems are indispensable. The traditional methods of indexing and classifying articles used at present in these automated systems are inadequate because of the enormous amount of material available. Any overview with respect to the content of articles gets lost. Different approaches are needed to assist the scientist in finding his or her way through the jungle of published material. Generally speaking, two types of information identification are normally used: (a) bibliographic information: Who (wrote the article), Where (was the research performed), Wherein (were the results published), and When (was the paper published); and (b) scientific classification: What (was calculated or measured), Why (was this subject of interest) and Which (methods were used)? Straightforward bibliographic information is the easiest part to handle in a search attempt for scientific knowledge. Indexing, with regard to content, however, digs deep into the problems of meaning and understanding.