Harmonization of conflicting medical opinions using argumentation protocols and textual entailment - a case study on Parkinson disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, affecting more than 1.2 million people in Europe. Medications are available for the management of its symptoms, but the exact cause of the disease is unknown and there is currently no cure on the market. To better understand the relations between new findings and current medical knowledge, we need tools able to analyze published medical papers based on natural language processing and tools capable of identifying various relationships of new findings with the current medical knowledge. Our work aims to fill the above technological gap. To identify conflicting information in medical documents, we enact textual entailment technology. To encapsulate existing medical knowledge, we rely on ontologies. To connect the formal axioms in ontologies with natural text in medical articles, we exploit ontology verbalization techniques. To assess the level of disagreement between human agents with respect to a medical issue, we rely on fuzzy aggregation. To harmonize this disagreement, we design mediation protocols within a multi-agent framework.