Annotation of scientific uncertainty using linguistic patterns

Abstract

Scientific uncertainty is an integral part of the research process and inherent to the construction of new knowledge. In this paper, we investigate the ways in which uncertainty is expressed in articles and propose a new interdisciplinary annotation framework to categorize sentences containing uncertainty expressions along five dimensions. We propose a method for the automatic annotation of sentences based on linguistic patterns for identifying the expressions of scientific uncertainty that have been derived from a corpus study. We processed a corpus of 5956 articles from 22 journals in three different discipline groups, which were annotated using our automatic annotation method. We evaluate our annotation method and study the distribution of uncertainty expressions across the different journals and categories. The results show a predominant concentration of the distribution of the scientific uncertainty expressions in the Results and Discussion section (71.4%), followed by 12.5% of expressions in the Background section, and the largest proportion of uncertainty expressions, approximately 70.3%, are formed as author(s) statements. Our research contributes methodological advances and insights into the diverse manifestations of scientific uncertainty across disciplinary domains and provides a basis for ongoing exploration and refinement of the understanding of scientific uncertainty communication.