A Natural Language Approach to Information Management: Tracking Scientific Advances Through the Structure of Words
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)
Abstract
In scientific texts specialist words, or terms, express conceptual knowledge. We show that by looking at the use of a term and its family of derivatives over time we can have a tangible picture of how an underlying concept has evolved in scientific advances. This is because the structure of a word encases a core idea and how that idea has been extended in a particular direction. This paper is an outline of a research programme with some preliminary results from an analysis the term nucleus in a nine million word corpus of nuclear physics articles written over thirty-six years, from 1969 to the present day, representing a body of specialist knowledge of recognized growth over time.