Biostatistics & Medical Informatics seminar
AI Seminar
The language of bioscience: talking about biological processes and facts
Marc Light, University of Iowa

In this talk we will explore how the biologists talk about facts and
processes.  We discuss preliminary work on rhetorical structure
and the use of nominalizations.  In addition, we present results
about the use of speculative language in MEDLINE abstracts: Results
from a manual annotation experiment suggest that the notion of
speculative sentence can be reliably annotated by humans.  In
addition, an experiment with automated methods also suggest that
reliable automated methods can also be developed.  Distributional
observations are also presented as well as a discussion of possible
uses for a system that can recognize speculative language.