Including authorial stance in the indexing of scientific documents
Résumé
This article argues that authorial stance should be taken into account in the indexing of scientific documents. Authorial stance has been widely studied in linguistics and is a typical feature of scientific writing that reveals the uniqueness of each author's perspective, their scientific contribution and their thinking. We argue that authorial stance guides the reading of scientific documents and that it can be used to characterize the knowledge contained in such documents. Our research has previously shown that people reading dissertations are interested both in a topic and in a document's authorial stance. Now, we would like to propose a two-tiered indexing system. Dissertations would first be divided into paragraphs; then, each information unit would be defined by topic and by the markers of authorial stance present in the document.