Year: 2019
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In evidence-based medicine, relevance of medical literature is determined by predefined relevance conditions. The conditions are defined based on PICO elements, namely, Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome. Hence, PICO annotations in medical literature are essential for automatic relevant document filtering. However, defining boundaries of text spans for PICO elements is not straightforward. In this paper, we study the agreement of PICO annotations made by multiple human annotators, including both experts and non-experts. Agreements are estimated by a standard span agreement (i.e. matching both labels and boundaries of text spans), and two types of relaxed span agreement (i.e. matching labels without guaranteeing matching boundaries of spans). Based on the analysis, we report two observations: (i) Boundaries of PICO span annotations by individual annotators are very diverse. (ii) Despite the disagreement in span boundaries, general areas of the span annotations arebroadly agreed by annotators. Our results suggest that applying a standard agreement alone may undermine the agreement of PICO spans, and adopting both a standard and a relaxed agreements is more suitable for PICO span evaluation.
Authors: Grace E. Lee, Aixin Sun
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2963404965