Finding Pragmatic Differences Between Disciplines
Lee Kezar Jay Pujara
Scholarly documents have a great degree of variation, both in terms of
content (semantics) and structure (pragmatics). Prior work in scholarly
document understanding emphasizes semantics through document summarization and
corpus topic modeling but tends to omit pragmatics such as document
organization and flow. Using a corpus of scholarly documents across 19
disciplines and state-of-the-art language modeling techniques, we learn a fixed
set of domain-agnostic descriptors for document sections and "retrofit" the
corpus to these descriptors (also referred to as "normalization"). Then, we
analyze the position and ordering of these descriptors across documents to
understand the relationship between discipline and structure. We report
within-discipline structural archetypes, variability, and between-discipline
comparisons, supporting the hypothesis that scholarly communities, despite
their size, diversity, and breadth, share similar avenues for expressing their
work. Our findings lay the foundation for future work in assessing research
quality, domain style transfer, and further pragmatic analysis.