The notion of importance in academic writing: detection, linguistic properties and targets

We present a semi-automatic approach to study expressions of evaluation in academic writing as well as targets evaluated. The aim is to uncover the linguistic properties of evaluative expressions used in this genre, i.e. investigate which lexicogrammatical patterns are used to attribute an evaluation towards a target. The approach encompasses pattern detection and the semi-automatic annotation of the patterns in the SciTex Corpus (Teich and Fankhauser, 2010; Degaetano-Ortlieb et al., 2013). We exemplify the procedures by investigating the notion of importance expressed in academic writing. By extracting distributional information provided by the annotation, we analyze how this notion might differ across academic disciplines and sections of research articles.