Detecting Speculations and their Scopes in Scientific Text

Distinguishing speculative statements from factual ones is important for most biomedical text mining applications. We introduce an approach which is based on solving two sub-problems to identify speculative sentence fragments. The first sub-problem is identifying the speculation keywords in the sentences and the second one is resolving their linguistic scopes. We formulate the first sub-problem as a supervised classification task, where we classify the potential keywords as real speculation keywords or not by using a diverse set of linguistic features that represent the contexts of the keywords. After detecting the actual speculation keywords, we use the syntactic structures of the sentences to determine their scopes.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Arzucan Özgür, Dragomir R. Radev
• Keywords: Actual Speculation Keywords, Biomedical Text Mining, EMNLP 2009, Keywords, Natural Language Processing