In the last few years speculation detection systems for biomedical texts have been developed successfully, most of them using machine-learning approaches. In this paper we present a system that finds the scope of speculation in English sentences, by means of dependency syntactic analysis. It infers which words are affected by speculation by browsing dependency syntactic structures. Thus, firstly an algorithm detects hedge cues a . Secondly the scope of these hedge cues is computed. We tested the system with the Bioscope corpus, annotated with speculation and obtaining competitive results compared with the state of the art systems. a The cue is defined as the lexical marker that expresses speculation, like might or may.
['Miguel Ballesteros', 'Virginia Francisco', 'Alberto Díaz', 'Jesús Herrera', 'Pablo Gervás']
INFERRING THE SCOPE OF SPECULATION USING DEPENDENCY ANALYSIS