DeSpin: A prototype system for detecting spin in biomedical publications

Anna Koroleva, Sanjay Kamath, Patrick M.M. Bossuyt, Patrick Paroubek

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Improving the quality of medical research reporting is crucial to reduce avoidable waste in research and to improve the quality of health care. Despite various initiatives aiming at improving research reporting - guidelines, checklists, authoring aids, peer review procedures, etc. - overinterpretation of research results, also known as distorted reporting or spin, is still a serious issue in research reporting. In this paper, we propose a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system for detecting several types of spin in biomedical articles reporting randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We use a combination of rule-based and machine learning approaches to extract important information on trial design and to detect potential spin. The proposed spin detection system includes algorithms for text structure analysis, sentence classification, entity and relation extraction, semantic similarity assessment. Our algorithms achieved operational performance for the these tasks, F-measure ranging from 79,42 to 97.86% for different tasks. The most difficult task is extracting reported outcomes. Our tool is intended to be used as a semiautomated aid tool for assisting both authors and peer reviewers to detect potential spin. The tool incorporates a simple interface that allows to run the algorithms and visualize their output. It can also be used for manual annotation and correction of the errors in the outputs. The proposed tool is the first tool for spin detection.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBioNLP 2020 - 19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages49-59
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148095
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing, BioNLP 2020 at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 9 Jul 2020 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Conference

Conference19th SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing, BioNLP 2020 at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period9/07/2020 → …

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