Understanding and Reasoning with Text
M. Anne Britt, Katja Wiemer, Keith Millis, Joseph Magliano, and Peter Hastings. Understanding and Reasoning with Text. In P. McCarthy and C. Boonthum, editors, Applied Natural Language Processing and Content Analysis: Identification, Investigation, and Resolution, IGI Global, 2011.
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Abstract
Consider the assignment that teachers have been giving their students for years: “Write an expository essay on a scientific topic. Example topics may include global warming, human memory, or the spread of infectious diseases. You must have at least three references.” The instructor makes it clear that the paper should have a thesis or claim that is supported by evidence. Claims might be that global warming will be disastrous only for some nations, why it is futile to teach mnemonics to young children, or that cell phone use causes cancer. From the perspective of the student (and cognitive psychologists), this assignment is challenging at any grade. The challenge is that the assignment entails a number of complicated and interconnected tasks. For example, reading a research paper requires the reader to make inferences that span sentences and paragraphs (in addition to a whole host of other processes), and to understand the logical and rhetorical structure of the text as a whole. If the paper describes an experiment, the student must additionally understand how to determine whether the data support the conclusion (i.e., the scientific method). In most cases, the student must also integrate the content of several papers (sources) into a coherent structure. This process involves evaluating the credibility of the sources, selecting relevant pieces of information from each, and putting them into a coherent argument structure. No wonder such assignments are met with groans.
BibTeX
@InCollection{Britt:anlp2011,
author = name:akkjp,
title = {Understanding and Reasoning with Text},
booktitle = {Applied Natural Language Processing and Content Analysis: Identification, Investigation, and Resolution},
publisher = {IGI Global},
year = 2011,
editor = {P. McCarthy and C. Boonthum},
abstract = {Consider the assignment that teachers have been giving their students for years: ``Write an expository essay on a scientific topic. Example topics may include global warming, human memory, or the spread of infectious diseases. You must have at least three references.'' The instructor makes it clear that the paper should have a thesis or claim that is supported by evidence. Claims might be that global warming will be disastrous only for some nations, why it is futile to teach mnemonics to young children, or that cell phone use causes cancer. From the perspective of the student (and cognitive psychologists), this assignment is challenging at any grade. The challenge is that the assignment entails a number of complicated and interconnected tasks. For example, reading a research paper requires the reader to make inferences that span sentences and paragraphs (in addition to a whole host of other processes), and to understand the logical and rhetorical structure of the text as a whole. If the paper describes an experiment, the student must additionally understand how to determine whether the data support the conclusion (i.e., the scientific method). In most cases, the student must also integrate the content of several papers (sources) into a coherent structure. This process involves evaluating the credibility of the sources, selecting relevant pieces of information from each, and putting them into a coherent argument structure. No wonder such assignments are met with groans.},