Abstract

Gradable adjectives are inherently vague and are used by clinicians to document medical interpretations (e.g., severe reaction, mild symptoms). We present a comprehensive study of gradable adjectives used in the clinical domain. We automatically identify gradable adjectives and demonstrate that they have a substantial presence in clinical text. Further, we show that there is a specific pattern associated with their usage, where certain medical concepts are more likely to be described using these adjectives than others. Interpretation of statements using such adjectives is a barrier in medical decision making. Therefore, we use a simple probabilistic model to ground their meaning based on their usage in context.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBioNLP 2016 - Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
EditorsKevin Bretonnel Cohen, Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Jun-ichi Tsujii
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages17-26
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626128
StatePublished - 2016
Event15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2016 - Berlin, Germany
Duration: Aug 12 2016 → …

Publication series

NameBioNLP 2016 - Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

Conference

Conference15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, BioNLP 2016
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period08/12/16 → …

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