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'HypothesisFinder:' a strategy for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text.

ABSTRACT: Speculative statements communicating experimental findings are frequently found in scientific articles, and their purpose is to provide an impetus for further investigations into the given topic. Automated recognition of speculative statements in scientific text has gained interest in recent years as systematic analysis of such statements could transform speculative thoughts into testable hypotheses. We describe here a pattern matching approach for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text that uses a dictionary of speculative patterns to classify sentences as hypothetical. To demonstrate the practical utility of our approach, we applied it to the domain of Alzheimer's disease and showed that our automated approach captures a wide spectrum of scientific speculations on Alzheimer's disease. Subsequent exploration of derived hypothetical knowledge leads to generation of a coherent overview on emerging knowledge niches, and can thus provide added value to ongoing research activities.

SUBMITTER: Malhotra A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3723489 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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'HypothesisFinder:' a strategy for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text.

Malhotra Ashutosh A Younesi Erfan E Gurulingappa Harsha H Hofmann-Apitius Martin M

PLoS computational biology 20130725 7

Speculative statements communicating experimental findings are frequently found in scientific articles, and their purpose is to provide an impetus for further investigations into the given topic. Automated recognition of speculative statements in scientific text has gained interest in recent years as systematic analysis of such statements could transform speculative thoughts into testable hypotheses. We describe here a pattern matching approach for the detection of speculative statements in scie ...[more]

PMID: 23935466

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Project description:BackgroundThe Portable Document Format (PDF) is the most commonly used file format for online scientific publications. The absence of effective means to extract text from these PDF files in a layout-aware manner presents a significant challenge for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use published literature as an information source. In this paper we introduce the 'Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction' (LA-PDFText) system to facilitate accurate extraction of text from PDF files of research articles for use in text mining applications.ResultsOur paper describes the construction and performance of an open source system that extracts text blocks from PDF-formatted full-text research articles and classifies them into logical units based on rules that characterize specific sections. The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1) Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2) Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3) Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks. We show that our system can identify text blocks and classify them into rhetorical categories with Precision1 = 0.96% Recall = 0.89% and F1 = 0.91%. We also present an evaluation of the accuracy of the block detection algorithm used in step 2. Additionally, we have compared the accuracy of the text extracted by LA-PDFText to the text from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. We then compared this accuracy with that of the text extracted by the PDF2Text system, 2commonly used to extract text from PDF. Finally, we discuss preliminary error analysis for our system and identify further areas of improvement.ConclusionsLA-PDFText is an open-source tool for accurately extracting text from full-text scientific articles. The release of the system is available at http://code.google.com/p/lapdftext/.

Dataset Information

'HypothesisFinder:' a strategy for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text.

Publications

'HypothesisFinder:' a strategy for the detection of speculative statements in scientific text.

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