Abstract
BackgroundResearch literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments. These claims are not always consistent and may even contradict each other. Being able to identify contradictory claims is important for those who rely on the biomedical literature. Automated methods to identify and resolve them are required to cope with the amount of information available. However, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable resources. We describe a methodology to develop a corpus which addresses this gap by providing examples of potentially contradictory claims and demonstrate how it can be applied to identify these claims from Medline abstracts related to the topic of cardiovascular disease.MethodsA set of systematic reviews concerned with four topics in cardiovascular disease were identified from Medline and analysed to determine whether the abstracts they reviewed contained contradictory research claims. For each review, annotators were asked to analyse these abstracts to identify claims within them that answered the question addressed in the review. The annotators were also asked to indicate how the claim related to that question and the type of the claim.ResultsA total of 259 abstracts associated with 24 systematic reviews were used to form the corpus. Agreement between the annotators was high, suggesting that the information they provided is reliable.ConclusionsThe paper describes a methodology for constructing a corpus containing contradictory research claims from the biomedical literature. The corpus is made available to enable further research into this area and support the development of automated approaches to contradiction identification.
Highlights
Research literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments
Systematic reviews aim to avoid this problem by evaluating and assessing the evidence related to a particular research question, including contradictory claims, and
This paper presents an approach to developing a corpus containing examples of potentially contradictory research claims which are identified by making use of information found in systematic reviews
Summary
Research literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments These claims are not always consistent and may even contradict each other. The research literature in medicine is vast and increasing rapidly These papers contain a massive amount of information, including claims about the research question being addressed. Systematic reviews aim to avoid this problem by evaluating and assessing the evidence related to a particular research question, including contradictory claims, and presenting it in a summarised format. These are not available for all research questions and are limited by the evidence that was available when the review was written
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