Abstract
Certainty and uncertainty are fundamental to science communication. Hedges have widely been used as proxies for uncertainty. However, certainty is a complex construct, with authors expressing not only the degree but the type and aspects of uncertainty in order to give the reader a certain impression of what is known. Here, we introduce a new study of certainty that models both the level and the aspects of certainty in scientific findings. Using a new dataset of 2167 annotated scientific findings, we demonstrate that hedges alone account for only a partial explanation of certainty. We show that both the overall certainty and individual aspects can be predicted with pre-trained language models, providing a more complete picture of the author’s intended communication. Downstream analyses on 431K scientific findings from news and scientific abstracts demonstrate that modeling sentence-level and aspect-level certainty is meaningful for areas like science communication. Both the model and datasets used in this paper are released at https://blablablab.si.umich.edu/projects/certainty/.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.784
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9959–10011
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.784
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.784
- Cite (ACL):
- Jiaxin Pei and David Jurgens. 2021. Measuring Sentence-Level and Aspect-Level (Un)certainty in Science Communications. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9959–10011, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Measuring Sentence-Level and Aspect-Level (Un)certainty in Science Communications (Pei & Jurgens, EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2021.emnlp-main.784.pdf