The Relation of Topics and Themes in Naturally Occurring Technical Paragraphs.

Abstract

There is a distinction between two kinds of thematic information in a passage: the main item, or topic, and the main idea, or theme. Although these are distinct kinds of information, the main idea should be about the main item. Separate groups of subjects generated title-like noun phrase identifications of topics, and simple sentence statements of themes, for paragraphs from Scientific American. Most theme statements contained one of the topics, with a frequency related to the popularity of the topic. Furthermore, theme statements most often contained a topic as the surface sentential subject. These results show that although identifying the main item and identifying the main idea are different tasks with different processes involved, there is a close correspondence between the two types of thematic information identified by readers. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 30, 1979
Accession Number
ADA065154

Entities

People

  • David E. Kieras

Organizations

  • University of Arizona

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Applied Psychology
  • Behavioral Sciences
  • Biological Sciences
  • Business Administration
  • Cognition
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Science
  • Education
  • Information Science
  • Manpower Utilization
  • Military Research
  • Psychology
  • Social Sciences
  • Students
  • Training
  • United States

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Educational Psychology
  • Technical Research and Report Writing.