Robert E. Mercer, Chrysanne Di Marco and Frederick W. Kroon "The Frequency of Hedging Cues in Citation Contexts in Scientific Writing" Advances in Artificial Intelligence 3060. p.75-88, 2004

[Eugene Garfield]

E-mail:
Robert E. Mercer  : mercer at csd.uwo.ca
Chrysanne Di Marco: cdimarco at uwaterloo.ca
Frederick W. Kroon: fwkroon at waterloo.ca

TITLE    :   The Frequency of Hedging Cues in Citation Contexts in
             Scientific Writing

AUTHOR   :   Robert E. Mercer, Chrysanne Di Marco and Frederick W. Kroon

SOURCE   :   Advances in Artificial Intelligence 3060. p.75-88, 2004

ADRESS   :
(1)   University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7,
(2)   University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1,


Abstract
Citations in scientific writing fulfill an important role in creating
relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field.
These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure that
is intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of
the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an
understanding of the rhetorical relations within the argumentative context
in which a citation is placed. To determine these relations automatically in
scientific writing, we have suggested that stylistic and rhetorical cues
will be significant. One type of cue that we have studied is the discourse
cue, which provides cohesion among textual components. Another form of
rhetorical cue involves hedging to modify the affect of a scientific claim.
Hedging in scientific writing has been extensively studied by Hyland,
including cataloging the pragmatic functions of the various types of cues.
In this paper we show that the hedging cues proposed by Hyland occur more
frequently in citation contexts than in the text as a whole. With this
information we conjecture that hedging cues are an important aspect of the
rhetorical relations found in citation contexts and that the pragmatics of
hedges may help in determining the purpose of citations.