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ABSTRACT Title of Document: RELEVANCE, RHETORIC, AND ARGUMENTATION: A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY INQUIRY INTO PATTERNS OF THINKING AND INFORMATION STRUCTURING Xiaoli Huang, PhD, 2009 Directed By: Professor Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies This dissertation research is a multidisciplinary inquiry into topicality, involving an in-depth examination of literatures and empirical data and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships and 33 types of presentation relationship). This inquiry investigates a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching, renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, achieves an enriched understanding of topicality and relevance, and induces a cohesive topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domains. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. Using qualitative content analysis, the inquiry focuses on meaning and deep structure: Phase 1: develop a unified theory-grounded typology of topical relevance relationships through close reading of literature and synthesis of thinking from communication, rhetoric, cognitive psychology, education, information science, argumentation, logic, law, medicine, and art history; Phase 2: in-depth qualitative analysis of empirical relevance datasets in oral history, clinical question answering, and art image tagging, to examine manifestations of the theory-grounded typology in various contexts and to further refine the typology; the three relevance datasets were used for analysis to achieve variation in form, domain, and context. The typology of topical relevance relationships is structured with three major facets: Functional role of a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic or an argument; Mode of reasoning: How information contributes to the user’s reasoning about a topic; Semantic relationship: How information connects to a topic semantically. This inquiry demonstrated that topical relevance with its close linkage to thinking and reasoning is central to many disciplines. The multidisciplinary approach allows synthesis and examination from new angles, leading to an integrated scheme of relevance relationships or a system of thinking that informs each individual discipline. The scheme resolving from the synthesis can be used to improve text and image understanding, knowledge organization and retrieval, reasoning, argumentation, and thinking in general, by people and machines. RELEVNCE, RHETORIC, AND ARGUMENTATION: A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY INQUIRY INTO PATTERNS OF THINKING AND INFORMATION STRUCTURING By Xiaoli Huang Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Professor Dagobert Soergel, Chair Professor Marilyn D. White Professor Kenneth R. Fleischmann Professor Yan Qu Professor Linda K. Coleman © Copyright by Xiaoli Huang 2009 Dedication To my parents. ii iii Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the constant mentoring efforts by my dedicated advisor, Dr. Dagobert Soergel, and the unconditional love and support of my parents, Zhongnan and Yumei. Through the ups and downs on my Ph.D. journey, I always gained courage and strength from their unfailing faith, encouragement, help, and caring. Thank-you will be too light a word to express how much I am indebted to the three of you. It has been a privilege to have the benefits of working closely with my advisor Dr. Dagobert Soergel on so many projects, papers, and courses. He has never ceased to amaze me with his capability to capture the essential of problems, his devotion to students, and his uncompromising passion to make a real difference in the world. I enjoyed and benefited immensely from our numerous discussions and conversations. He has taught me to think deeper and independently; to grasp the true meaning of education and mentorship; and to never give up on achieving excellence and perfection no matter how small each step is. I am very grateful to members of my committee for providing me with important guidance in developing and refining this dissertation. Their wide spectrum of knowledge has broadened my perspective and led to many improvements of the work. My special thanks to Dr. Marilyn White, my advisor for the first two years and my de facto co-advisor for the rest of my studies. I thank her for introducing me to the world of information studies and directing me to many important opportunities on the Ph.D. journey. I very much appreciate her insights, critical advice, and enduring support. iv I am equally indebted to Dr. Doug Oard, Dr. Judith Klavans, and Dr. Jimmy Lin who have given me the wonderful opportunity to work on three significant research projects respectively: the Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives (MALACH) project funded by NSF IIS Award 0122466, the Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) project funded by the Mellon Foundation, and a project on Evaluation of the PICO Structure as a Knowledge Representation for Clinical Questions. Direct participations in these three intriguing projects helped greatly in shaping the initial ideas of this work and enriching it with essential data. I thank the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship committee for recognizing the value of my work and honoring me with this prestigious fellowship for the year 2008. Additional funding support for this work includes graduate fellowships and assistantships at the University of Maryland. I am grateful to all the faculty members and administrative staffs at the College of Information Studies for supporting and helping me move through this process. To all my friends and fellow students in the program, I thank you for your friendship, inspirations, peer support, and genuine interest in my work. We have walked, struggled, and cheered together on the memorable Ph.D. journey. You are the witness and integral part of my intellectual growth. Thank you all! v Table of Contents Dedication .................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ............................................................................................................. xii List of Figures ........................................................................................................... xiv Chapter 1. Introduction and Purpose of the Research ............................................ 3 1.1 Problem Statement .............................................................................................. 4 1.2 Themes and Questions ...................................................................................... 11 Chapter 2. Conceptual Framework and Literature Review ................................. 13 2.1 Overview: Relevance Research in Information Science ................................... 13 2.2 Conceptual Framework of Relevance in Information Science ......................... 15 2.3 Conceptual Definition of Topical Relevance .................................................... 23 2.4 The “System View” vs. the “User View” of Relevance ................................... 27 2.4.1 System View of Relevance ........................................................................ 28 2.4.2 User View of Relevance ............................................................................ 29 2.5 The Entity-based Approach vs. the Relationship-based Approach to Conceptualizing Relevance ..................................................................................... 36 2.5.1 Entity-based Approach to Conceptualizing Relevance .............................. 37 2.5.1.1 Saracevic (1975): Generic Definition of Relevance ............................... 37 2.5.1.2 Mizzaro (1997): Four-dimensional Relevance Model ............................ 39 2.5.1.3 Saracevic (1996): A Stratified System of Relevances ............................ 41 2.5.2 The Relationship-based Approach of Conceptualizing Relevance ............ 42 2.6 Misunderstandings of Topical Relevance ......................................................... 44 2.6.1 Misunderstanding 1: Topical Relevance Seen as Limited to the System View of Relevance .............................................................................................. 44 2.6.2 Misunderstanding 2: Topical Relevance Seen as Excluded from User- defined Relevance ............................................................................................... 46 2.6.3 Misunderstanding 3: Oversimplified Conception of Topical Relevance ... 48 Chapter 3. Methodology ........................................................................................... 69 3.0 Outline of the Research ..................................................................................... 69 3.1 Literature-Based Analysis ................................................................................. 71 3.1.1 Scope of the Literature to Be Analyzed ..................................................... 71 3.1.2 Literature Analysis