Summary of the paper

Title How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations
Authors Hercules Dalianis and Sumithra Velupillai
Abstract Clinical texts contain a large amount of information. Some of this information is embedded in contexts where e.g. a patient status is reasoned about, which may lead to a considerable amount of statements that indicate uncertainty and speculation. We believe that distinguishing such instances from factual statements will be very beneficial for automatic information extraction. We have annotated a subset of the Stockholm Electronic Patient Record Corpus for certain and uncertain expressions as well as speculative and negation keywords, with the purpose of creating a resource for the development of automatic detection of speculative language in Swedish clinical text. We have analyzed the results from the initial annotation trial by means of pairwise Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) measured with F-score. Our main findings are that IAA results for certain expressions and negations are very high, but for uncertain expressions and speculative keywords results are less encouraging. These instances need to be defined in more detail. With this annotation trial, we have created an important resource that can be used to further analyze the properties of speculative language in Swedish clinical text. Our intention is to release this subset to other research groups in the future after removing identifiable information.
Topics Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Document Classification, Text categorisation, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval
Full paper How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations
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Bibtex @InProceedings{DALIANIS10.245,
  author = {Hercules Dalianis and Sumithra Velupillai},
  title = {How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  month = {may},
  date = {19-21},
  address = {Valletta, Malta},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Mike Rosner and Daniel Tapias},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {2-9517408-6-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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