Abstract
Text typing is the classification of text according to the purpose of the author. There is no universally recognised register of types: the four distinguished here are descriptive, narrative, persuasive or instructional. Type is assigned by analysing the clausal structure of the discourse and certain semantic features within the text such as theme of sentence, modality of verb, and process type (i.e. whether the verbal group is material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal or existential). The ability to discriminate textual genre is an important step in the evaluation and classification of documents.
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Eve Wilson is a lecturer in Computing. An early career in compiler writing for Ferranti Ltd. in Manchester established an interest in artificial languages and computational linguistics, which rapidly developed to encompass natural language. A period as a Research Fellow with the Department of Education and Science introduced problems of bibliographic information and free text retrieval from large document collections. Law proved a rich field for research: the variety of documents ensures many different ways of using language are represented. She is currently exploiting long-term work on legal language with the recent innovations in workstations and hypertext.
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Wilson, E. Automatic text typing. Comput Hum 23, 429–442 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176649
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176649