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International Conference on Formal Grammar

International Conference on Formal Grammar

FG 2015, FG 2016: Formal Grammar pp 130–146Cite as

A Modal Representation of Graded Medical Statements

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9804))

Abstract

Medical natural language statements uttered by physicians are usually graded, i.e., are associated with a degree of uncertainty about the validity of a medical assessment. This uncertainty is often expressed through specific verbs, adverbs, or adjectives in natural language. In this paper, we look into a representation of such graded statements by presenting a simple non-normal modal logic which comes with a set of modal operators, directly associated with the words indicating the uncertainty and interpreted through confidence intervals in the model theory. We complement the model theory by a set of RDFS-/OWL 2 RL-like entailment (if-then) rules, acting on the syntactic representation of modalized statements. Our interest in such a formalization is related to the use of OWL as the de facto standard in (medical) ontologies today and its weakness to represent and reason about assertional knowledge that is uncertain or that changes over time. The approach is not restricted to medical statements, but is applicable to other graded statements as well.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Recall that an interval is a set of real numbers, together with a total ordering relation (e.g., \(\le \)) over the elements, thus \(\emptyset \) is a perfect, although degraded interval.

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Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper has been co-funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union within the project PAL (Personal Assistant for healthy Lifestyle) under Grant agreement no. 643783. The authors have profited from discussions with our colleagues Miroslav Janíček and Bernd Kiefer and would like to thank the three reviewers for their suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

    Hans-Ulrich Krieger

  2. Institute of Medical Informatics, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Stefan Schulz

Authors
  1. Hans-Ulrich Krieger
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  2. Stefan Schulz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans-Ulrich Krieger .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, University of Rennes 1 , Rennes, France

    Annie Foret

  2. Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya , Barcelona, Spain

    Glyn Morrill

  3. Tilburg University , Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Reinhard Muskens

  4. Department of General Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf , Düsseldorf, Germany

    Rainer Osswald

  5. INRIA Nancy, Villers-lès-Nancy, France

    Sylvain Pogodalla

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Krieger, HU., Schulz, S. (2016). A Modal Representation of Graded Medical Statements. In: Foret, A., Morrill, G., Muskens, R., Osswald, R., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2015 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9804. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53042-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53042-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-53041-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-53042-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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