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When writing a research paper, the author has to select information to include in the paper to support various arguments. The information has to be organized and synthesized into a coherent whole through relationships and information structures. There is hardly any research on the information structure of research papers, and how information structure supports rhetorical and argument structures. Thus, this study is focused on information organization in the Abstract and Introduction sections of sociology research papers, analyzing the information structure of research objective, question, hypothesis, and result statements. The study is limited to research papers reporting research that investigated cause–effect relations between two concepts. Two semantic frames were developed to specify the types of information associated with cause–effect and comparison relations, and used as coding schemes to annotate the text for different information types. Six link patterns between the two frames were identified—showing how comparisons are used to support the claim that the cause‐effect relation is valid. This study demonstrated how semantic frames can be incorporated in discourse analysis to identify deep structures underlying the argument structure. The results carry implications for the knowledge representation of academic research in knowledge graphs, for semantic relation extraction, and teaching of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When writing a research paper, the author has to select information to include in the paper to support various arguments. The information has to be organized and synthesized into a coherent whole through relationships and information structures. There is hardly any research on the information structure of research papers, and how information structure supports rhetorical and argument structures. Thus, this study is focused on information organization in the Abstract and Introduction sections of sociology research papers, analyzing the information structure of research objective, question, hypothesis, and result statements. The study is limited to research papers reporting research that investigated cause–effect relations between two concepts. Two semantic frames were developed to specify the types of information associated with cause–effect and comparison relations, and used as coding schemes to annotate the text for different information types. Six link patterns between the two frames were identified—showing how comparisons are used to support the claim that the cause‐effect relation is valid. This study demonstrated how semantic frames can be incorporated in discourse analysis to identify deep structures underlying the argument structure. The results carry implications for the knowledge representation of academic research in knowledge graphs, for semantic relation extraction, and teaching of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories are becoming an increasingly important knowledge management and knowledge sharing tool to communicate ideas, values and experiences both to internal organizational members and to external stakeholders. This paper reports an initial effort to develop a framework for the analysis of organizational stories. The framework has two major parts: the story framework comprising six elements, and the interaction/communication framework. A story analysis instrument was constructed based on the framework, comprising a series of questions to answer or a set of categories to select. The instrument was applied to twenty organizational stories, and was found to be easy to use and achieve good agreement across the coders. Relations between story type, knowledge embodied and story purpose were explored, and recommendations for crafting organizational stories are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. This is a study of hierarchical navigation; how users browse a taxonomy-based interface to an organizational repository to locate information resources. The study is part of a project to develop a taxonomy for an library and information science department to organize resources and support user browsing in a digital repository. Method. The data collection was carried out using task-based navigation exercises with twenty-two participants. A cognitive framework of hierarchical navigation is proposed, involving the cognitive process of matching context, topic and/or resource type concepts to taxonomy categories. Analysis. The analysis was mainly qualitative, supplemented with simple statistics and measures of prevision and recall, and error analysis. Results. Though users often use the topic concept in making navigation choices, they sometimes make use of context and resource-type concepts. Users infer a variety of relationships between a task concept and a taxonomy category, including the application area, associated tool, associated process/procedure/technique, associated institution and academic discipline. Conclusions. Users prefer to use common or generic associations in selecting categories to browse, rather than formal disciplinary relations. Some users prefer to search by people groups, contexts and institutions, rather than by subject categories. Users have difficulty distinguishing between various kinds of document and resource types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Potential and benefits of classification schemes and thesauri in building organizational taxonomies cannot be fully utilized by organizations. Empirical data of building an organizational taxonomy by the top-down approach of using classification schemes and thesauri appear to be lacking. The paper seeks to make a contribution in this regard. Design/methodology/approach - A case study of building an organizational taxonomy was conducted in the information studies domain for the Division of Information Studies at Nanyang Technology University, Singapore. The taxonomy was built by using the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Information Science Taxonomy, two information systems taxonomies, and three thesauri (ASIS&T, LISA, and ERIC). Findings - Classification schemes and thesauri were found to be helpful in creating the structure and categories related to the subject facet of the taxonomy, but organizational community sources had to be consulted and several methods had to be employed. The organizational activities and stakeholders' needs had to be identified to determine the objectives, facets, and the subject coverage of the taxonomy. Main categories were determined by identifying the stakeholders' interests and consulting organizational community sources and domain taxonomies. Category terms were selected from terminologies of classification schemes, domain taxonomies, and thesauri against the stakeholders' interests. Hierarchical structures of the main categories were constructed in line with the stakeholders' perspectives and the navigational role taking advantage of structures/term relationships from classification schemes and thesauri. Categories were determined in line with the concepts and the hierarchical levels. Format of categories were uniformed according to a commonly used standard. The consistency principle was employed to make the taxonomy structure and categories neater. Validation of the draft taxonomy through consultations with the stakeholders further refined the taxonomy. Originality/value - No similar study could be traced in the literature. The steps and methods used in the taxonomy development, and the information studies taxonomy itself, will be helpful for library and information schools and other similar organizations in their effort to develop taxonomies for organizing content and aiding navigation on organizational sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to develop a method for automatic construction of multidocument summaries of sets of research abstracts that may be retrieved by a digital library or search engine in response to a user query. Sociology dissertation abstracts were selected as the sample domain in this study. A variable-based framework was proposed for integrating and organizing research concepts and relationships as well as research methods and contextual relations extracted from different dissertation abstracts. Based on the framework, a new summarization method was developed, which parses the discourse structure of abstracts, extracts research concepts and relationships, integrates the information across different abstracts, and organizes and presents them in a Web-based interface. The focus of this article is on the user evaluation that was performed to assess the overall quality and usefulness of the summaries. Two types of variable-based summaries generated using the summarization method—with or without the use of a taxonomy—were compared against a sentence-based summary that lists only the research-objective sentences extracted from each abstract and another sentence-based summary generated using the MEAD system that extracts important sentences. The evaluation results indicate that the majority of sociological researchers (70%) and general users (64%) preferred the variable-based summaries generated with the use of the taxonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]