Approaches to determining the factuality of diagnoses and findings in clinical text tend to rely on dictionaries of marker words for uncertainty and negation. Here, a method for semi-automatically expanding a dictionary of marker words using distributional semantics is presented and evaluated. It is shown that ranking candidates for inclusion according to their proximity to cluster centroids of semantically similar seed words is more successful than ranking them according to proximity to each individual seed word.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.