Information structures in sociology research papers: Modeling cause–effect and comparison relations in research objective and result statements1
分析了社会学论文摘要和引言中研究目标、问题、假设和结果陈述的信息结构，开发了两个语义框架来标注因果和比较关系，并识别出六种链接模式，对知识图谱和学术写作教学有启示。
Abstract When writing a research paper, the author has to select information to include in the paper to support various arguments. The information has to be organized and synthesized into a coherent whole through relationships and information structures. There is hardly any research on the information structure of research papers, and how information structure supports rhetorical and argument structures. Thus, this study is focused on information organization in the Abstract and Introduction sections of sociology research papers, analyzing the information structure of research objective, question, hypothesis, and result statements. The study is limited to research papers reporting research that investigated cause–effect relations between two concepts. Two semantic frames were developed to specify the types of information associated with cause–effect and comparison relations, and used as coding schemes to annotate the text for different information types. Six link patterns between the two frames were identified—showing how comparisons are used to support the claim that the cause‐effect relation is valid. This study demonstrated how semantic frames can be incorporated in discourse analysis to identify deep structures underlying the argument structure. The results carry implications for the knowledge representation of academic research in knowledge graphs, for semantic relation extraction, and teaching of academic writing.