Text-Level Structure of Research Papers: Implications for Text-Based Information Processing Systems

This paper discusses the implication of text-level structure for text-based information processing systems. In this paper, text-level structure of research papers is described with a set of typical functional components of research papers such as, background, purpose, methods, etc. and their order in a text. In order to suggest various applications, the experiments of retrieval and passage extraction were conducted using a manually structure-tagged fulltext database of research papers. As a result, we show that searching full-length texts using text-level structure achieved higher precision, compared to the searching without it. The paper also shows examples of extracted passages and suggests the application of text-level structure for text-based information systems, including passage extraction, browsing, and navigation within/across texts.