Publication
A Modal Representation of Graded Medical Statements
Hans-Ulrich Krieger; Stefan Schulz
In: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Formal Grammar. Conference on Formal Grammar (FG-2015), August 8-9, Barcelona, Spain, Proceedings werden zusätzlich in 2016 bei Springer als Buch erscheinen, 8/2015.
Abstract
Medical natural language statements uttered by physicians are usually
graded, i.e., are associated with a degree of uncertainty about
the validity of a medical assessment.
This uncertainty is often expressed through specific verbs,
adverbs, or adjectives in natural language.
In this paper, we look into a representation of such graded
statements by presenting a simple non-standard modal logic which
comes with a set of modal operators, directly associated with the words
indicating the uncertainty and interpreted through confidence intervals
in the model theory.
We complement the model theory by a set of RDFS-/OWL 2 RL-like entailment
(if-then) rules, acting on the syntactic representation of modalized statements.
Our interest in such a formalization is related to the use of OWL as the
de facto standard in (medical) ontologies today and its weakness
to represent and reason about assertional knowledge that is uncertain or
that changes over time.
The approach is not restricted to medical statements, but is applicable
to other graded statements as well (e.g., in technical diagnosis).