Process / pipeline

Speculation Detection — Hedging Analysis

Speculation detection, also known as hedging analysis, is a natural-language-processing task that identifies epistemic uncertainty markers — words and phrases such as 'may', 'possibly', 'it is suggested that' — within scientific, biomedical, and news texts. Formalised by Hyland (1996) for scientific writing and benchmarked by the CoNLL-2010 shared task, the method reveals where authors signal incomplete knowledge, tentativeness, or distance from a claim rather than asserting facts directly.

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Sources

  1. Hyland, K. (1996). Writing Without Conviction? Hedging in Science Research Articles. Applied Linguistics, 17(4), 433-454. DOI: 10.1093/applin/17.4.433
  2. Farkas, R. et al. (2010). The CoNLL-2010 Shared Task: Learning to Detect Hedges and their Scope in Natural Language Text. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning — Shared Task (CoNLL 2010), 1-12. link

Related methods

ScholarGateSpeculation Detection (Speculation and Uncertainty Detection (Hedging Analysis)). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/text-mining/speculation-detection