Medical diagnosis lost in translation - Analysis of uncertainty and negation expressions in English and Swedish clinical texts

In the English clinical and biomedical text domains, negation and certainty usage are two well-studied phenomena. However, few studies have made an in-depth characterization of uncertainties expressed in a clinical setting, and compared this between different annotation efforts. This preliminary, qualitative study attempts to 1) create a clinical uncertainty and negation taxonomy, 2) develop a translation map to convert annotation labels from an English schema into a Swedish schema, and 3) characterize and compare two data sets using this taxonomy. We define a clinical uncertainty and negation taxonomy and a translation map for converting annotation labels between two schemas and report observed similarities and differences between the two data sets.