1. The Claim Framework Catherine Blake clblake@illinois.edu
School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2. Shift from Retrieval to Synthesis
Motivation
Relentless increase in electronically available text
Life Sciences
17 millionth entry added in April 2007
5,200 journals indexed
12,000 new articles each week !
Chemistry – more than 110,000 articles in 1 year alone
Consequences:
Hundreds of thousands of relevant articles
Implicit connections between literature go unnoticed
Shift from Retrieval to Synthesis

3. The Claim Framework
Scientists use a shared sublanguage to express claims made in an empirical study
 The Claim Framework captures the key characteristics of the claim sublanguage
Text mining can be used to populate the Claim Framework automatically
 An automated system will identify all and only the claims that have been identified manually

4. Claim Definition “To assert in the face of possible contradiction”
Example sentence reporting a claim
“This study showed that Tamoxifen reduces the breast cancer risk”
Explicit Claim in the Claim Framework
Tamoxifenagent
reduceschange
[breast cancer risk] object

5. Distribution of Claim Categories
Category
Total (%)
Pilot(%)
Main(%)
Explicit
2489
77.11
332
83.42
2157
76.63
Implicit 87
2.70 3
0.75 84
2.98
Observation
298
9.23 24
6.03
274
9.73
Correlation
174
5.39 12
3.02
162
5.75
Comparison
165
5.11 27
6.85
138
4.9
Total
3228
100
398
2830

6. Inter Annotator Agreement
Information Facet Kappa Agreement Agent 0.71 substantial Object 0.77 substantial Change 0.57 moderate Change+ChangeDir 0.88 almost perfect

7. Location of Claims Total Sentences With % Section Claim Total section
With %
Section
Claim
Total
section
claim
Abstract 98
309
31.72
7.84
Introduction
357
979
36.47
28.56
Method 6
1121
0.54
0.48
Result
293
1829
16.02
23.44
Discussion
539
1406
38.34
43.12
1250
5535
22.58
100.00

8. Interested ? Send me an email clblake@illinois.edu
To see more details on the Claim Framework and an automated approach to populate explicit claims:
Blake, C. (2010) Beyond genes, proteins, and abstracts: Identifying scientific claims from full-text biomedical articles, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 43(2),