Multi-label Annotation in Scientific Articles - The Multi-label Cancer Risk Assessment Corpus

With the constant growth of the scientific literature, automated processes to enable access to its contents are increasingly in demand. Several functional discourse annotation schemes have been proposed to facilitate information extraction and summarisation from scientific articles, the most well known being argumentative zoning. Core Scientific concepts (CoreSC) is a three layered fine-grained annotation scheme providing content-based annotations at the sentence level and has been used to index, extract and summarise scientific publications in the biomedical literature. A previously developed CoreSC corpus on which existing automated tools have been trained contains a single annotation for each sentence. However, it is the case that more than one CoreSC concept can appear in the same sentence. Here, we present the Multi-CoreSC CRA corpus, a text corpus specific to the domain of cancer risk assessment (CRA), consisting of 50 full text papers, each of which contains sentences annotated with one or more CoreSCs. The full text papers have been annotated by three biology experts. We present several inter-annotator agreement measures appropriate for multi-label annotation assessment. Employing several inter-annotator agreement measures, we were able to identify the most reliable annotator and we built a harmonised consensus (gold standard) from the three different annotators, while also taking concept priority (as specified in the guidelines) into account. We also show that the new Multi-CoreSC CRA corpus allows us to improve performance in the recognition of CoreSCs. The updated guidelines, the multi-label CoreSC CRA corpus and other relevant, related materials are available at the time of publication at http://www.sapientaproject.com/.