REPRESENTING AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC

DOCUMENTS

Kanso Hassan

1,2

, Soulé-Dupuy Chantal

1,2

and Tazi Said

1,3

Université de Toulouse 1, 2 rue Du Doyen Gabriel Marty 31042 Toulouse, cedex 9 France

IRIT, CNRS Université Paul Sabatier118, route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse cedex 4, France

LAAS, CNRS, 7 Avenue Colonel Roche 31077 Toulouse cedex 4, France

Keywords: Intentions of communication, Text segmentation, Intentional structure, Electronic document,

Experimentation.

Abstract: The existing structures of documents are not ample for nowadays user’s needs in terms of search and

processing. The Intentional Structure (IS) is a model that maps author’s intentions to the segments of

documents. It is defined to enhance documents process in terms of goals, means and reasons. The main

objective of this work is to provide a methodology of recognizing intentions of communication of scientific

documents associated to segments. This article focuses on the representational aspect of the author’s

intention, by providing a graphical representation of intentions.

1 INTRODUCTION

Processing electronic document is constantly

becoming more difficult and more complex, mainly

for volumetric and heterogeneity reasons such as the

huge varieties of topics, and the complexity of

structures. Indeed, the mass of produced and

exchanged electronic documents has continued to

grow; searching and finding relevant information in

this mass is compared to the proverbial needle in a

haystack. However, documents are till today

generally processed in terms of their logical and

physical structures, with the main objective being to

represent and treat such documents in terms of their

hierarchical organization. The use of these structures

has a major interest in order to facilitate the

processing of documents such as composing, storing

and finding; although the are other concepts for the

structure documents, such as rhetoric, semantics and

particularly intention are not yet used to help authors

to be more explicit and readers to reach knowledge

more easily. We assume that if the communicative

intentions of documents are made explicit following

an appropriate model, the intelligibility and

processing of these documents should be enhanced.

Indeed, in any rational context, human actions are

directed by intentions, i.e. by mental states which

represent knowledge related to the desires and

beliefs and to the context of the actions. Written

communication between humans, in scientific,

professional and pedagogical contexts, is also

governed by intentions.

Document processing systems do not give

authors and users the opportunity to express their

intentions explicitly. Current models cannot at the

moment represent the author’s intentions. Despite

wide diversity in the concept of document structure,

(e.g. logical structure, layout structure, syntactic and

semantic structures), only a few investigations have

been carried out on authors’ intentions concerning

the document structures (Grosz, Sidner, 1990).

However, much research has focused on the

intentions of dialogue structures and only a few

articles concern relations between written documents

and intentions. The word intention in this context

signifies the effects authors intend to have on their

readers.

Intentions are generally implicit, and users (both

authors and readers) are sometimes unaware of

them. The main idea defended here, is that if

authoring systems recognize and represent intentions

in such a manner as to make them explicit, they

might contribute to render a text more intelligible to

readers. Moreover, it would be easier to find and

process documents in a corpus by searching in terms

of the author’s intentions.

489

Hassan K., Chantal S. and Said T. (2007).

REPRESENTING AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC DOCUMENTS.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 489-492

DOI: 10.5220/0002357604890492

 SciTePress

This paper deals with a first step towards the

recognition of intention within scientific

publications in the computer science field. The idea

is that given a model of intention defined in (Al-

Tawki, 2002), we aim at finding a methodology of

matching a text to this model. At the progress state

of this work, the recognition is made “by hand”; we

have found certain regularities in the studied corpus

which constitute the main new result presented here.

The objective of the research conducted here is to

formalize these findings and to implement

algorithms to automate as much as possible the

process of segmentation.

This paper is organized as follows. The next

section presents an overview related to the concepts

of intention in written communication, and to the

field of text segmentation. In section 3, we present

the model of intentional structure. Finally, the article

finishes by a discussion of future developments.

2 STATE OF THE ART

The research undertaken here aims at analyzing

authorial intentions. Each text is segmented into

fragments that correspond to the recognized

intentions associated with these fragments. This

work is related to two main fields: intention and text

segmentation.

2.1 Intention

The concept of intention is omnipresent in any

human action and is particularly important in

communication. Several works attempt to account

for the relations between an action undertaken by a

human being and the mental state which guides this

action. Searle remains a main reference on the

matter (Searle, 1983). He distinguishes between two

types of intention: intentions in the course of action

and former, or pre-formulated, intentions. Former

intentions correspond to the representation of the

initial goal fixed before the beginning of the action

whereas the intention in the course of action

accompanies the action during its execution. This

distinction makes it possible to treat only intentional

actions, and not the "micro actions", or the

movements which are not inevitably intentional.

Intentions in the course of action are those which

represent these intentions, whereas the former

intentions represent a condition of satisfaction of the

intention (Pacherie 2003). Writing is an intentional

action; its characteristic is that it represents two

types of action, the physical actions of using a

medium to transcribe thought by writing and the

actions which aim at modifying the mental state of

the reader, by transmitting information, knowledge,

advice or orders to him. This second type of action

can be accomplished or not depending on the

receiver of the written text: the reader. The concept

of associating intentions with segments of document

was initiated by Grosz and Sidner in (Grosz, Sidner,

1986). This concept consists in describing the

intentions of the author for each segment of the

document. This description will help to read and

consult the document in terms of the intentions of

the author. These intentions are added in the form of

annotations to the documents marked out with XML

tags for example.

According to the theory of Grosz and Sidner

(Grosz, Sidner, 1986), the intentional structure

makes it possible to represent the structure of the

goals. The subjacent objective allows the recognition

of the intentions of the author by the reader. These

authors identified two structural relations between

intentions, fundamental for the analysis of the

structure of the discourse at a basic level: the

relation of dominance and the relation of satisfaction

precedence: an intention I1 dominates an intention

I2 if the satisfaction of I2 contributes to that of I1

and an intention I1 precedes (the satisfaction of) I2 if

I1 must be satisfied before I2. It is not certain if

these two relations are sufficient, on a pragmatic

level, to describe the production process of a

discourse effectively, because what is interesting in

this case, is to be able to associate a finer direction

to the relations between various parts of discourse.

However, the two relations between intentions

suggested by Grosz and Sidner do not account for

the large variety of these intentions and may imply

loss of semantics. On the other hand, this theory is

built so as to depend neither on the domain, nor of

the type of the discourse. Indeed, the studies on the

modeling of the intention derive from the causal

theories of the action. To describe an intention is to

find a rational explanation of the action which was

caused by this intention. This explanation depends

on the context in which the action can be performed.

The concept of association of the intentional

structures is a concept which consists in describing

the intentions of the author for each segment of the

document. This description will be able to help to

browse the document in terms of authorial

intentions.

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

490

2.2 Segmentation of Text

Usually, segmentation is defined as determining the

positions at which topics change in a stream of text

or speech. This is determined by computing word

distribution in text with similarity-based or feature-

based algorithms. Research from the discourse

processing field, inspired by the model of Sidner

(Grosz, Sidner, 1986), has investigated the relation

between the intentions and the spans of utterances

referred to as discourse segments. Segmenting text

or multimedia data into coherent regions would have

a number of immediate practical uses such as

information retrieval or text summarization.

Our research is motivated by enhancing

document processing and exploiting intentional

structures as a new paradigm. Our goal is to segment

texts in terms of author’s intentions (Passonneau,

Litman, 1993), i.e. to distinguish segments from a

text, as being a set of utterances that defines a sub-

goal of the author. The author of a written document

has a goal when he or she composes a document and

particularly in scientific publications. To facilitate

the comprehension of the document, the author

organizes his ideas as a plan that achieves this goal.

Each goal is then a set of sub-goals; the expression

of sub-goals in the document is made through

utterances as parts of the textual document. Thus on

the level of the discourse, a segment is a set of

utterances that expresses communicative goals. The

structure of a text segment makes it possible to

apprehend the sense of this text beyond the sense of

each word which composes it. In the analysis of a

discourse, the description of its structure consists in

cutting out the text as a set of segments (also called

fragments), and in identifying the relations which

link these segments. An intention corresponds to an

action that has a goal; the action is performed thanks

to a means and it is justified by arguments that we

call reason. A fragment of text is a textual unit that

corresponds to a part of intention and it can be a

means, a goal or a reason.

The segmentation we focus on corresponds to

determining the positions of segments that represent

parts of intentions such as what expresses the action,

the means and the reason. We suppose that the

structure of intentions corresponds to plans of

resolution process according to shared plan theory

defined by Lochbaum (Lochbaum, 1996), (Grosz,

Kraus 1996).

3 OUR INTENTIONAL

STRUCTURE MODEL

We propose a new concept which enables us to treat

a document in terms of the intentions of its authors.

Our objective is to have a representation of the

intention through the relations between its

constituents. By definition our representation of

intention is:

I (A, G, M*, R*)

Where:

I represents the intention carried out by action A;

A is an action which expresses what the author of the

intention wants to do;

G represents the goal to achieve by performing the

action;

M represents the means to express how the action is

accomplished; * to mean that we can have no means

or multiple means.

R represents the reason to express why the author

chooses this action and for which reasons, * to mean

that we can have no reason or multiple reasons.

Intentions can be depicted as a graph as Figure 1

shows.

Action

Goal

Means Reason

Figure 1: Graph of an intention.

3.1 The Intentional Structure model

The Intentional structure is a hierarchical

composition of elementary intentions. An

elementary intention corresponds to an action that

can not be divided. Thus if we combine the

intentions we obtain an intentional structure. A

generalized global schema such as the one shown in

Figure 2 depicts the intentional structure in a general

case.

Each bloc in this model represents an intention;

each intention is composed by an action, goals, a

means and a reasons. Each Means and each Reason

may be considered as an intention or as a final

element of the tree. In the Figure 2 the first blocs

composed by an action, a goal and a means and a

reason that are considered as two intentions. We can

take the means or reasons as a new intention bloc

and develop it again recursively, but we cannot

REPRESENTING AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC DOCUMENTS

491

develop the goal as an intention because it is

considered by definition as a final element of the

intentional structure tree.

Intention1

Action1

But1

Int. 11

Action11

But11 Raison11

Action12

But12 Moyen12

Action13

But13 M oyen13 Raison13

Action14

But14 Moyen14 Raison14

Int. 11

Int. 14

Int. 13

Int. 12

Intention1

Action1

Goal1

Int. 11

Action11

Goal11 Reason11

Action12

Goal2 Mean12

Action13

But13 M oyen13 Raison13

Action13

goal13 Mean13 Reason13

Action14

But14 Moyen14 Raison14

Action14

Goal14 Mean14 Reason14

Int. 11

Int. 14

Int. 13

Int. 12

Intention1

Action1

But1

Int. 11

Action11

But11 Raison11

Action12

But12 Moyen12

Action13

But13 M oyen13 Raison13

Action14

But14 Moyen14 Raison14

Int. 11

Int. 14

Int. 13

Int. 12

Intention1

Action1

Goal1

Int. 11

Action11

Goal11 Reason11

Action12

Goal2 Mean12

Action13

But13 M oyen13 Raison13

Action13

goal13 Mean13 Reason13

Action14

But14 Moyen14 Raison14

Action14

Goal14 Mean14 Reason14

Int. 11

Int. 14

Int. 13

Int. 12

Figure 2: Representation of an intentional structure.

4 DISCUSSION AND

CONCLUSION

The utility of our research is to improve the

performances of information retrieval systems. Or in

other words, to create an organization for these

documents in order to facilitate the access to

information in complement with traditional

Information Retrieval models. This analysis should

make it possible to establish a model of intentional

structure and to propose a representation of this

model. The choice of this manual cutting was done

in conformity with competences and the

representation of the concept of intention which was

developed by Tazi et al (Tazi, 2001).

In our model, we used the ontology to define the

whole collections of concepts (Action, Goals,

Means, Reasons) which give us a structured of the

intentions. Our model of recognition for the

intentional structure of a document is based on the

segmentations of texts to represent the components

of the intentional structure. We chose a corpus of

small size initially, to be able to analyze in a

qualitative way, and not only in a quantitative way,

the various stages of our methodology of

representation of intentional structure. Indeed, this

analysis becomes more difficult if we choose a

corpus of documents of great size.

Our future work is to enhance the structure of the

intention and to continue the experimentation for the

caracterisation of the relations between intentions,

and between the concepts of the Intentional

Strcuture. We are working also to build a semi-

automatic methodology to recognize intentions of

scientific documents to help us to make an automatic

segmentation. A building a support tools of

assistance to the writing and the reading of

documents based on discovered their intentions.

REFERENCES

Barbara J. Grosz, and Sarit Kraus. 1996. Collaborative

plans for complex group action. Artificial Intelligence,

86(2):269-357B.

Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner - Attention,

Intentions and the Structure of Discourse,

Computational Linguistics, 12(3), pp. 175-204 1986.

Grosz, Barbara J. and Candace L. Sidner. 1990. Plans for

discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. L. Morgan, and M. E.

Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT

Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 417--444.

Lochbaum, Karen E. 1994. Using Collaborative Plans to

Model the Intentional Structure of Discourse. Ph.D.

thesis, Harvard University. Available as Technical

Report TR-25-94, Center for Research in Computing

Technology, Division of Applied Sciences.

Pacherie 03. Dynamic Intentions and Intention Action,

Dialogue, XLII, 3, 2003, pp. 447-480.

Passonneau R., J., and Litman D., J., intention-based

segmentation: Human reliability and correlation with

linguistics cuesÿ, in proceedings of the 31st Meeting

Of the association for computational linguistics, pp.

148-155, Columbus, Ohio, June 1993.

Searle, J. "Intentionality". Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1983.

Tazi S. et Evrard F., Intentional Structures of Documents,

ACM Hypertext’ proceedings, University of Arhus,

Arhus, Denmark. August 14-18, 2001.

Y. Al-Tawki., Création par réutilisation de documents

décrits par les intentions de l'auteur Doctorat de

l'Université de Toulouse 1, Avril 2002.

http://protege.stanford.edu/ visited on July 2006.

R M

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

492