Communicative-Function-Based Sentence Classification for Construction of an Academic Formulaic Expression Database
Kenichi Iwatsuki, Akiko Aizawa · 2021
Formulaic expressions (FEs), such as 'in this paper, we propose' are frequently used in scientific papers.FEs convey a communicative function (CF), i.e. 'showing the aim of the paper' in the above-mentioned example.Although CF-labelled FEs are helpful in assisting academic writing, the construction of FE databases requires manual labour for assigning CF labels.In this study, we considered a fully automated construction of a CF-labelled FE database using the top-down approach, in which the CF labels are first assigned to sentences, and then the FEs are extracted.For the CF-label assignment, we created a CF-labelled sentence dataset, on which we trained a SciB-ERT classifier.We show that the classifier and dataset can be used to construct FE databases of disciplines that are different from the training data.The accuracy of in-disciplinary classification was more than 80%, while crossdisciplinary classification also worked well.We also propose an FE extraction method, which was applied to the CF-labelled sentences.Finally, we constructed and published a new, large CF-labelled FE database.The evaluation of the final CF-labelled FE database showed that approximately 65% of the FEs are correct and useful, which is sufficiently high considering practical use.