Syntactic and semantic structure analysis of article titles in analytical chemistry

Abstract

Titles of scientific papers often include words that develop definite syntactic patterns around them. In analytical chemistry, these roles are played by frequently used analysis- related words which demand an object, such as "analysis of", "analyse" or "analysing". Syntactic patterns of the titles in cluding 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, ma trix 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.