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

In this paper the extent to which modem 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.