Corpora for conceptualisation and zoning of scientific papers

Abstract

We present two complementary annotation schemes for sentence based annotation of full scientific papers, CoreSC and AZ-II, which have been applied to primary research articles in chemistry. The AZ scheme is based on the rhetorical structure of a scientific paper and follows the knowledge claims made by the authors. It has been shown to be reliably annotated by independent human coders and has proven useful for various information access tasks. AZ-II is its extended version, which has been successfully applied to chemistry. The CoreSC scheme takes a different view of scientific papers, treating them as the humanly readable representations of scientific investigations. It therefore seeks to retrieve the structure of the investigation from the paper as generic high-level Core Scientific Concepts (CoreSC). CoreSCs have been annotated by 16 chemistry experts over a total of 265 full papers in physical chemistry and biochemistry. We describe the differences and similarities between the two schemes in detail and present the two corpora produced using each scheme. There are 36 shared papers in the corpora, which allows us to quantitatively compare aspects of the annotation schemes. We show the correlation between the two schemes, their strengths and weaknesses and discuss the benefits of combining a rhetorical based analysis of the papers with a content-based one.