Finding words that signify uncertainty

What is it about?

There are different types of uncertainty in scholarly publications. Some are to do with the way to describe things that we do not know precisely, others are to do with opinions and interpretations from different perspectives. In this work, we developed a method for finding semantically equivalent words and phrases to capture three types of uncertainties.

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Why is it important?

Finding semantically equivalent words or expressions computationally has several advantages over thesaurus-based approaches and hand-picking ones as well. We made use of word embedding techniques for this purpose. With these identified cue words, one can compute the level of uncertainty of sentences, paragraphs, entire text documents, and even groups of documents.