How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations

Hercules Dalianis, 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.
Anthology ID:
L10-1166
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/245_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Hercules Dalianis and Sumithra Velupillai. 2010. How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations (Dalianis & Velupillai, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/245_Paper.pdf