A high-precision approach to detecting hedges and their scopes

We extend our prior work on speculative sentence recognition and speculation scope detection in biomedical text to the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task on Hedge Detection. In our participation, we sought to assess the extensibility and portability of our prior work, which relies on linguistic categorization and weighting of hedging cues and on syntactic patterns in which these cues play a role. For Task 1B, we tuned our categorization and weighting scheme to recognize hedging in biological text. By accommodating a small number of vagueness quantifiers, we were able to extend our methodology to detecting vague sentences in Wikipedia articles. We exploited constituent parse trees in addition to syntactic dependency relations in resolving hedging scope. Our results are competitive with those of closed-domain trained systems and demonstrate that our high-precision oriented methodology is extensible and portable.