Text Windows and Phrases Differing by Discipline, Location in Document, and Syntactic Structure

Abstract

Knowledge of window style, content, location and grammatical structure may be used to classify documents as originating within a particular discipline or may be used to place a document on a theory versus practice spectrum. This distinction is also studied here using the type-token ratio to differentiate between sublanguages. The statistical significance of windows is computed, based on the the presence of terms in titles, abstracts, citations, and section headers, as well as binary independent (BI) and inverse document frequency (IDF) weightings. The characteristics of windows are studied by examining their within window density (WWD) and the S concentration (SC), the concentration of terms from various document fields (e.g. title, abstract) in the fulltext. The rate of window occurrences from the beginning to the end of document fulltext differs between academic fields. Different syntactic structures in sublanguages are examined, and their use is considered for discriminating between specific academic disciplines and, more generally, between theory versus practice or knowledge versus applications oriented documents.