# Scientific Questions: A New Target for Biomedical NLP

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER · 2020 · $462,393

## Abstract

Project Summary
 Natural language processing (NLP) technology is now widespread (e.g. Google Translate) and has several
important applications in biomedical research. We propose a new target for NLP: extraction of scientific
questions stated in publications. A system that automatically captures and organizes scientific questions from
across the biomedical literature could have a wide range of significant impacts, as attested to in our diverse
collection of support letters from researchers, journal editors, educators and scientific foundations. Prior work
focused on making binary (or probabilistic) assessments of whether a text is hedged or uncertain, with the goal
of downgrading such statements in information extraction tasks—not computationally capturing what the
uncertainty is about. In contrast, we propose an ambitious plan to identify, represent, integrate and reason
about the content of scientific questions, and to demonstrate how this approach can be used to address two
important new use cases in biomedical research: contextualizing experimental results and enhancing literature
awareness. Contextualizing results is the task of linking elements of genome-scale results to open questions
across all of biomedical research. Literature awareness is the ability to understand important characteristics of
large, dynamic collections of research publications as a whole. We propose to produce rich computational
representations of the dynamic evolution of research questions, and to prototype textual and visual interfaces
to help students and researchers explore and develop a detailed understanding of key open scientific questions
in any area of biomedical research.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10069773
- **Project number:** 1R01LM013400-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER
- **Principal Investigator:** LAWRENCE E HUNTER
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $462,393
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-08-01 → 2024-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10069773

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10069773, Scientific Questions: A New Target for Biomedical NLP (1R01LM013400-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10069773. Licensed CC0.

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