Argumentative Zoning Applied to Critiquing Novices’ Scientific Abstracts

We present a system that applies Argumentative Zoning (AZ) (Teufel and Moens, 2002), a method of determining argumentative structure in texts, to the task of advising novice graduate writers on their writing. For this task, it is important to automatically determine the rhetorical/argumentative status of a given sentence in the text. On the basis of this information, users can be advised that a different sentence order might be more advantageous or that certain argumentative moves are missing. In implementing such a system, we had to port AZ from English to Portuguese, as our system is designed to help the writing of Brazilian PhD theses in Computer Science. In this chapter, we report on the overall system, named SciPo, the porting exercise, including a human annotation experiment to verify the reproducibility of our annotation scheme, and the intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of the AZ module of the system.