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.

Writing Analytics