Capturing rhetoric and argumentation aspects within scientific publications

Dissemination can be seen as a communication process between scientists, in which they expose and support their findings, while discussing claims stated in related scientific publications. Often this discourse structure is hidden in the semantics expressed by the publication’s content and thus hard to discover by the reader. Externalization, the process of articulating tacit knowledge into explicit concepts, holds the key to knowledge creation. Consequently, the knowledge becomes crystallized, thus allowing it to be shared with and by others. In this paper, we present SALT (Semantically Annotated LATEX), a semantic authoring framework that aims at defining a clear formalization for externalizing the knowledge captured within rhetorical and argumentation discourses. SALT follows a layered approach with the goal of providing a comprehensive domain-independent model for scientific publications, based of three ontologies: (i) the Document Ontology, capturing the linear structure of the publication, (ii) the Rhetorical Ontology, modeling the rhetorical and argumentation, and (iii) the Annotation Ontology, linking the rhetoric and argumentation to the publication’s structure and content. SALT can be used independently of the writing environment. As proof-of-concept, we show its application in LATEX, based on a special LATEX syntax and in MS Word 2003, using visual controls. The resulting semantic documents can be used in a variety of applications, one of them being briefly detailed in this paper. Finally, in addition to a detailed discussion on the state-of-the-art, the paper presents the evaluation we have carried out, to analyze the framework’s soundness, suitability for the task and its general usability during the authoring process