An Initial Analysis of Topic-based Similarity among Scientific Documents Based on their Rhetorical Discourse Parts

Summaries and abstracts of research papers have been traditionally used for many purposes by scientists, research practitioners, editors, programme committee members or reviewers (e.g. to identify relevant papers to read or publish, cite them, explore new fields and disciplines). As a result, many paper repositories only store or expose abstracts, what may limit the capacity of finding the right paper for a specific research purpose. Given the size limitations and the concise nature of abstracts, they usually omit explicit references to some contributions and impacts of the paper. Therefore for certain information retrieval tasks they cannot be considered as the most appropriate excerpt of the paper to base these operations on. In this paper we have studied other kinds of summaries, built upon textual fragments falling under certain categories of the scientific discourse, such as outcome, background, approach, etc, in order to decide which one is more appropriate in order to substitute the original text. In particular, two novel measures are proposed: (1) internalrepresentativeness, which evaluates how well a summary describes what the full-text is about and (2) external-representativeness, which evaluates the potential of a summary to discover related texts. Results suggest that summaries explaining the method of a scientific article express a more accurate description of the full-content than others. In addition, more relevant related articles are also discovered from summaries describing the method, together with those containing the background knowledge or the outcomes of the research paper.