BioExcom: Detection and categorization of speculative sentences in biomedical literature

Biological research papers are replete with speculative sentences. We present the BioExcom rule-based system, which detects speculations in biomedical literature. Furthermore, it enables to distinguish automatically between prior and new speculations in the analyzed paper. BioExcom is based on the Contextual Exploration processing (hierarchical research of linguistic surface markers with the EXCOM computational platform). To accomplish this task, BioExcom uses also specific linguistic resources established by concise semantic analysis performed by a biologist and a linguist. Our work shows that it is possible to detect and categorize speculative sentences without computational deep linguistic analyses. This work could be useful for biologists who are interested by finding new hypothesis in literature. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.