Towards Semantic Modeling of Contradictions and Disagreements: A Case Study of Medical Guidelines

Abstract: We introduce a formal distinction between contradictions and disagreements in natural language texts, motivated by the need to formally reason about contradictory medical guidelines. This is a novel and potentially very useful distinction, and has not been discussed so far in NLP and logic. We also describe a NLP system capable of automated finding contradictory medical guidelines; the system uses a combination of text analysis and information retrieval modules. We also report positive evaluation results on a small corpus of contradictory medical recommendations.