Syntactic methods for negation detection in radiology reports in Spanish

Abstract

Identification of the certainty of events is an important text mining problem. In particular, biomedical texts report medical conditions or findings that might be factual, hedged or negated. Identification of negation and its scope over a term of interest determines whether a finding is reported and is a challenging task. Not much work has been performed for Spanish in this domain. In this work we introduce different algorithms developed to determine if a term of interest is under the scope of negation in radiology reports written in Spanish. The methods include syntactic techniques based in rules derived from PoS tagging patterns, constituent tree patterns and dependency tree patterns, and an adaption of NegEx, a well known rule-based negation detection algorithm (Chapman et al., 2001a). All methods outperform a simple dictionary lookup algorithm developed as baseline. NegEx and the PoS tagging pattern method obtain the best results with 0.92 F1.