Diligent citizens must critically analyze arguments for science policy recommendations, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions or growing genetically modified food crops. Science policy articles present arguments for and against such recommendations using scientific evidence and rhetorical devices. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of argumentation and rhetorical devices in two journal articles on climate change issues. One objective was to gain a better understanding of use of rhetorical devices in this genre, as a prerequisite for designing and (...) building a rhetorically-annotated digital corpus of full-text science policy articles. The near term objective was to inform the design of pedagogical tools to help students analyze science policy arguments. (shrink)

There is a driving need computationally to interrogate large bodies of text for a range of non-denotative meaning (e.g., to plot chains of reasoning, detect sentiment, diagnose genre, and so forth)...

To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the discourse unfolds. We introduce a framework with these properties, which has been used to analyse mathematical dialogues and expository texts. The framework can recover salient elements of discourse at, and within, the sentence level, as well as the way mathematical content connects to form larger argumentative structures. (...) We show how the framework might be used to support computational reasoning, and argue that it provides a more natural way to examine the process of proving theorems than do Lamport’s structured proofs. (shrink)