Notes: XIP – Automated rhetorical parsing of scientific metadiscourse

Reference: Simsek, D., Buckingham Shum, S., Sandor, A., De Liddo, A., & Ferguson, R. (2013). XIP Dashboard: visual analytics from automated rhetorical parsing of scientific metadiscourse. In: 1st International Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics, 8 Apr 2013, Leuven, Belgium.

Background:

Learners should have the ability to critically evaluate research articles and be able to identify the claims and ideas in scientific literature.

Purpose:

  • Automating analysis of research articles to identify evolution of ideas and findings.
  • Describing the Xerox Incremental Parser (XIP) which identifies rhetorically significant structures from research text.
  • Designing a visual analytics dashboard to provide overviews of the student corpus.

Method:

  • Argumentative Zoning (AZ) to annotate moves in research articles by Simone Teufel.
  • Rhetorical moves tagged by XIP – partly overlap and partly different from AZ scheme: SUMMARIZING, BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE, CONTRASTING IDEAS, NOVELTY, SIGNIFICANCE, SURPRISE, OPEN QUESTION, GENERALIZING
  • Sample discourse moves:
    • Summarizing: “The purpose of this article….”
    • Contrasting ideas: “With an absence of detailed work…”
      • Sub-classes: novelty, surprise, importance, emerging issue, open question
  • XIP outputs a raw output file containing semantic tags and concepts extracted from text.
  • Data: Papers from LAK & EDM conferences and journal – 66 LAK and 239 EDM papers extracting 7847 sentences and 40163 concepts.
  • Dashboard design – Refer original paper to see the process involved in prototyping the visualizations.

Tool:

  • XIP is now embedded in the Academic Writing Analytics (AWA) tool by UTS. AWA provides analytical and reflective reports on students’ writing.

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