  The difficulties of automatic extraction of definitions and methods from
scientific documents lie in two aspects: (1) the complexity and diversity of
natural language texts, which requests an analysis method to support the
discovery of pattern; and, (2) a complete definition or method represented by a
scientific paper is usually distributed within text, therefore an effective
approach should not only extract single sentence definitions and methods but
also integrate the sentences to obtain a complete definition or method. This
paper proposes an analysis method for discovering patterns of definition and
method and uses the method to discover patterns of definition and method.
Completeness of the patterns at the semantic level is guaranteed by a complete
set of semantic relations that identify definitions and methods respectively.
The completeness of the patterns at the syntactic and lexical levels is
guaranteed by syntactic and lexical constraints. Experiments on the self-built
dataset and two public definition datasets show that the discovered patterns
are effective. The patterns can be used to extract definitions and methods from
scientific documents and can be tailored or extended to suit other
applications.
