A survey of English as the universalizing language of chemistry.In recent decades the use of English has extended greatly in various fields, including both science and engineering, where it is now more widely used than in any other scientific fields. However, only a few papers have been published (cf. Sano, 1986) to demonstrate the trend in a quantitative manner. In order to discuss this trend here, a bibliometric approach has been adopted in order to retrieve the relevant information from a large scientific database.
A trial was carned out to effect automatic extraction of significant words from titles of scientific papers and display them in tabular form. The extraction algonthm is based on the simple syntactic patterns developed around a "pivot word." which has high control over the use of functional words in its vicinity. A pivot word and prepositions as well as punctuation marks delimit and extract title words; no word dictionary is used. The approach was applied to article titles in analytical chemistry. which include "determination(s)" and "determining" as pivot words. The syntactic patterns were expressed by Backus Naur Form notations, from which extraction rules were denved. Sample titles were processed on a personal computer, loaded with LISP programs for information extraction and table format display in accordance with the facets essential to analy sis. The adequacy of the approach was regarded as good with regard to its simplicity. This approach not only extracts keywords from article titles but also provides them with proper roles in conformity with the facets pertinent to the subject concerned.
Titles of scientific papers often include words that develop definite syntactic patterns around them. In analytical chemistry, these roles are played by frequently used analysisrelated words which demand an object, such as "analysis of", "analyse" or "analysing". Syntactic patterns of the titles including these words were studied paying particular attention to prepositions which were then collectively expressed by Backus Naur Form (BNF) notations. The patterns can be utilised to extract word strings corresponding to analyte, matrix and analytical procedure, which are the main facets through which we grasp the core ideas in analytical chemistry papers. Facet tabulation of extracted words provides a display easier to see and understand than the titles themselves. In addition, this method can be applied to automatic assignment of facet categories to title words; and the word categories may be used for analysis of titles in other diversified syntactic patterns. This approach can be extended to the analysis of article titles in other disciplines.
This report discusses the various types of linguistic information readily obtainable from online databases which are generally used for acquisition of technical information. There are illustrated examples of equivalent words, sample sentences and statistical linguistic data. The implications of online databases as substitutes for dictionaries, and as corpora for linguistic survey are discussed. Online databases include a vast amount of linguistic information, which is unabridged and continually updated, providing useful criteria for selection of words and expressions, and quantitative data for linguistic study.
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