Are School-of-thought Words Characterizable?

School of thought analysis is an important yet not-well-elaborated scientific knowledge dis-covery task. This paper makes the first attempt at this problem. We focus on one aspect of the problem: do characteristic school-of-thought words exist and whether they are characteriza-ble? To answer these questions, we propose a probabilistic generative School-Of-Thought (SOT) model to simulate the scientific author-ing process based on several assumptions. SOT defines a school of thought as a distribution of topics and assumes that authors determine the school of thought for each sentence before choosing words to deliver scientific ideas. SOT distinguishes between two types of school-of-thought words for either the general back-ground of a school of thought or the original ideas each paper contributes to its school of thought. Narrative and quantitative experi-ments show positive and promising results to the questions raised above.