%0 Conference Proceedings %T Communicative-Function-Based Sentence Classification for Construction of an Academic Formulaic Expression Database %A Iwatsuki, Kenichi %A Aizawa, Akiko %Y Merlo, Paola %Y Tiedemann, Jorg %Y Tsarfaty, Reut %S Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume %D 2021 %8 April %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online %F iwatsuki-aizawa-2021-communicative %X Formulaic expressions (FEs), such as ‘in this paper, we propose’ are frequently used in scientific papers. FEs convey a communicative function (CF), i.e. ‘showing the aim of the paper’ in the above-mentioned example. Although CF-labelled FEs are helpful in assisting academic writing, the construction of FE databases requires manual labour for assigning CF labels. In this study, we considered a fully automated construction of a CF-labelled FE database using the top–down approach, in which the CF labels are first assigned to sentences, and then the FEs are extracted. For the CF-label assignment, we created a CF-labelled sentence dataset, on which we trained a SciBERT classifier. We show that the classifier and dataset can be used to construct FE databases of disciplines that are different from the training data. The accuracy of in-disciplinary classification was more than 80%, while cross-disciplinary classification also worked well. We also propose an FE extraction method, which was applied to the CF-labelled sentences. Finally, we constructed and published a new, large CF-labelled FE database. The evaluation of the final CF-labelled FE database showed that approximately 65% of the FEs are correct and useful, which is sufficiently high considering practical use. %R 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.304 %U https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.304 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.304 %P 3476-3497