Domain Adaptation for Automatic Detection of Speculative Sentences

The use of speculative, uncertain or vague sentences is common in both spoken and written language. Automatic detection of such sentences plays significant role in natural language processing and social sciences as it could enhance information extraction systems and lead to faster and more reliable analyses in social sciences. However, this problem has only been addressed in biomedical and encyclopedic domains. In this paper, we address automatic speculation detection (as a binary sentence classification task) in monetary policy domain, and for the first time, on the transcripts of spoken language. We build two new speculation detection datasets and a dictionary of speculation triggers using expert annotations, and benchmark the performance of automatic speculation detection systems in this new domain.