An Evaluation Dataset for Identifying Communicative Functions of Sentences in English Scholarly Papers

Kenichi Iwatsuki, Florian Boudin, Akiko Aizawa


Abstract
Formulaic expressions, such as ‘in this paper we propose’, are used by authors of scholarly papers to perform communicative functions; the communicative function of the present example is ‘stating the aim of the paper’. Collecting such expressions and pairing them with their communicative functions would be highly valuable for various tasks, particularly for writing assistance. However, such collection and paring in a principled and automated manner would require high-quality annotated data, which are not available. In this study, we address this shortcoming by creating a manually annotated dataset for detecting communicative functions in sentences. Starting from a seed list of labelled formulaic expressions, we retrieved new sentences from scholarly papers in the ACL Anthology and asked multiple human evaluators to label communicative functions. To show the usefulness of our dataset, we conducted a series of experiments that determined to what extent sentence representations acquired by recent models, such as word2vec and BERT, can be employed to detect communicative functions in sentences.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.212
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1712–1720
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.212
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kenichi Iwatsuki, Florian Boudin, and Akiko Aizawa. 2020. An Evaluation Dataset for Identifying Communicative Functions of Sentences in English Scholarly Papers. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1712–1720, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
An Evaluation Dataset for Identifying Communicative Functions of Sentences in English Scholarly Papers (Iwatsuki et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.lrec-1.212.pdf