Based on the annotated data, we compute the relative sentence-level certainty when each aspect is certain/uncertain. Do different aspects of certainty contribute equally to the overall perceived sentence-level certainty? the answer is negative. In scientific discovery, different aspects can have different certainties. Different aspects of certainty have different effects on the overall sentence-level certainty This difference in distribution suggests that hedges are less effective as indicators of uncertainty in all aspects.Ģ. For example, "Further research is needed to understand whether this is causal" does not contain any hedges, but expresses a strong uncertainty about causality, suggesting that many deterministic descriptions cannot be simply based on hedges The dictionary captures it nicely.įurthermore, the authors used hedges with varying frequency when describing different aspects of certainty (Figure 2 bottom).
Comparing sentence-level certainty with the number of hedges (Figure 2, top) shows that there is only a modest correlation between hedges and certainty, Pearson's r = 0.55, although they are widely used as indicators (proxy). Based on annotated data, our study first examines the extent to which hedges can explain differences in certainty in scientific findings. However, whether hedges can fully capture sentence-level and aspect-level certainty remains unclear. Hedges are widely used as a synonym for linguistic uncertainty. Hedges do not fully capture certainty at the sentence and aspect levels However, this pattern does not exist in science news.
Our analysis shows that: 1) hedges do not fully capture the sentence-level and aspect-level certainty of scientific discoveries 2) with over 6000 paired discoveries from news and abstracts, the sentence-level of news discoveries less certainty, which contradicts existing research that journalists tend to make science sound more certain 3) findings of paper abstracts vary by journal impact and team size: low-impact journals and large teams typically report higher Sentence-level certainty presents scientific findings.
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