A sample of 2032 sentences from the literature of four subject disciplines was analyzed to uncover regularities and significant differences among them in their use of various syntactic features. Among those features analyzed, which are necessary parts of a well formed sentence, it was found that the two disciplines representing the social sciences rarely differ significantly from each other, and the same is true of the two hard science disciplines. However, when hard and social sciences are compared, the differences are often significant. Among syntactic features which are not necessary to a sentence, the social science disciplines still show few significant differences, but the two hard science disciplines show many more significant differences. A variety of syntactic regularities is also noted. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This study investigated two hypotheses concerning the use of anaphors in information retrieval. The first hypothesis, that anaphors tend to refer to integral concepts rather than to peripheral concepts, was well supported. Two samples of documents, one in psychology and the other in computer science, were examined by subject experts who judged the centrality of phrases which were referred to anaphorically. The second hypothesis, that various term weighting schemes are affected differently by anaphoric resolution, was also well supported. It was found that schemes which incorporate document length into the calculations produce much smaller increases in term weights for terms occurring in anaphoric resolutions than do those which do not consider document length. It is concluded that although anaphoric resolution has potential for better representing the “aboutness” of a document, care must be taken in choosing both the anaphoric classes to be resolved and the term weighting schemes to be used in measuring a document's topicality.

Natural language texts are used extensively in a range of information science tasks. Such use requires increased attention to discourse level linguistic phenomena which have the potential for impact on these tasks. One such device, anaphoric reference, was investigated in a frequently used text type, namely, scientific abstracts. Descriptive data on the extent of use of discourse anaphora in abstracts was gathered and rules for distinguishing anaphoric functioning of terms were compiled and tested. Results show a mean use of 3.67 functioning anaphors per abstract in a random sample of 600 abstracts from two databases. Testing of rules indicates high feasibility of future algorithmic recognition of anaphoric uses of terms. © 1987 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Abstract A preliminary investigation was conducted to explore which characteristics of citing and cited works may aid in determining relatedness between documents. Thirteen variables were tested on 31 library/information science articles containing nearly 500 citations. Analysis indicates that source of cited work, source of citing work, number of times a work is cited in text, and type of citing article show promise of predicting relatedness between citing and cited works.