Negation detection in Swedish clinical text: An adaption of NegEx to Swedish

Abstract Background Most methods for negation detection in clinical text have been developed for English text, and there is a need for evaluating the feasibility of adapting these methods to other languages. A Swedish adaption of the English rule-based negation detection system NegEx, which detects negations through the use of trigger phrases, was therefore evaluated. Results The Swedish adaption of NegEx showed a precision of 75.2% and a recall of 81.9%, when evaluated on 558 manually classified sentences containing negation triggers, and a negative predictive value of 96.5% when evaluated on 342 sentences not containing negation triggers. Conclusions The precision was significantly lower for the Swedish adaptation than published results for the English version, but since many negated propositions were identified through a limited set of trigger phrases, it could nevertheless be concluded that the same trigger phrase approach is possible in a Swedish context, even though it needs to be further developed. Availability The triggers used for the evaluation of the Swedish adaption of NegEx are available at http://people.dsv.su.se/~mariask/resources/triggers.txt and can be used together with the original NegEx program for negation detection in Swedish clinical text.