RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES: THE CASE FOR ARGUMENTATIONAL ANALYSIS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

In this paper the extent to which modern indexing and information retrieval research meets the needs and requirements of different types of readers is criticised. A review of the stagnation in this field gives evidence for the need for a radically different approach. The main problem is identified as the assumption that knowledge contained in a scientific article can be represented by a semantic network only, and therefore can be manipulated by formal logic approaches. Complementary to this, a plea is made to start an argumentational analysis of the — highly structured — corpus of scientific articles (mainly in physics). Such an analysis might lead to an argumentational syntax which will also enable the non‐expert to browse through large quantities of electronically stored articles. A first attempt at such an approach is given. Furthermore the possible use of the Standard General Markup Language (sgml) approach in relation to a hypertext environment for a possible application is discussed.