Finding Pragmatic Differences Between Disciplines

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural and organizational differences in scholarly documents across 19 disciplines by learning domain-agnostic descriptors and analyzing their positioning, revealing shared structural archetypes and variability among disciplines.

Contribution

It introduces a method to normalize document structure using learned descriptors and analyzes discipline-specific organizational patterns in scholarly texts.

Findings

Discovered common structural archetypes across disciplines

Identified variability in document organization within disciplines

Found similarities in scholarly expression despite diversity

Abstract

Scholarly documents have a great degree of variation, both in terms of content (semantics) and structure (pragmatics). Prior work in scholarly document understanding emphasizes semantics through document summarization and corpus topic modeling but tends to omit pragmatics such as document organization and flow. Using a corpus of scholarly documents across 19 disciplines and state-of-the-art language modeling techniques, we learn a fixed set of domain-agnostic descriptors for document sections and "retrofit" the corpus to these descriptors (also referred to as "normalization"). Then, we analyze the position and ordering of these descriptors across documents to understand the relationship between discipline and structure. We report within-discipline structural archetypes, variability, and between-discipline comparisons, supporting the hypothesis that scholarly communities, despite their size, diversity, and breadth, share similar avenues for expressing their work. Our findings lay the foundation for future work in assessing research quality, domain style transfer, and further pragmatic analysis.