Abstract
Formulaic expressions (FEs), such as ‘in this paper, we propose’ are frequently used in scientific papers. FEs convey a communicative function (CF), i.e. ‘showing the aim of the paper’ in the above-mentioned example. Although CF-labelled FEs are helpful in assisting academic writing, the construction of FE databases requires manual labour for assigning CF labels. In this study, we considered a fully automated construction of a CF-labelled FE database using the top–down approach, in which the CF labels are first assigned to sentences, and then the FEs are extracted. For the CF-label assignment, we created a CF-labelled sentence dataset, on which we trained a SciBERT classifier. We show that the classifier and dataset can be used to construct FE databases of disciplines that are different from the training data. The accuracy of in-disciplinary classification was more than 80%, while cross-disciplinary classification also worked well. We also propose an FE extraction method, which was applied to the CF-labelled sentences. Finally, we constructed and published a new, large CF-labelled FE database. The evaluation of the final CF-labelled FE database showed that approximately 65% of the FEs are correct and useful, which is sufficiently high considering practical use.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.eacl-main.304
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3476–3497
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2021.eacl-main.304/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.304
- Cite (ACL):
- Kenichi Iwatsuki and Akiko Aizawa. 2021. Communicative-Function-Based Sentence Classification for Construction of an Academic Formulaic Expression Database. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 3476–3497, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Communicative-Function-Based Sentence Classification for Construction of an Academic Formulaic Expression Database (Iwatsuki & Aizawa, EACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2021.eacl-main.304.pdf
- Data
- SciERC