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Some Issues on Detecting Negation from Text Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference Some Issues on Detecting Negation from Text Eduardo Blanco and Dan Moldovan Human Language Technology Research Institute The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75080 USA {eduardo,moldovan}@hlt.utdallas.edu Abstract negative polarity items, determine their scope and reverse its polarity. Actually, it is much more problematic. Negation is present in all human languages and it is used to re- Negation plays a remarkable role towards understanding verse the polarity of parts of a statement. It is a complex phe- text and poses considerable challenges. Negation interacts nomenon that interacts with many other aspects of language. Besides the direct meaning, negated statements often carry a with many other phenomena and it is used for so many dif- latent positive meaning. Negation can be interpreted in terms ferent purposes that a deep analysis is needed. The following of its scope and focus. This paper explores the importance are some issues found when dealing with negation. of both scope and focus to capture the meaning of negated Detecting the scope of negation in itself is challenging: statements. Some issues on detecting negation from text are All vegetarians do not eat meat means that vegetarians do outlined, the forms in which negation occurs are depicted and not eat meat and yet All that glitters is not gold means that heuristics to detect its scope and focus are proposed. it is not the case that all that glitters is gold (so out of all things that glitter, some are gold and some are not). In the Introduction former example, the universal quantifier all has scope over the negation; in the latter, the negation has scope over all. Capturing the semantics of text is a long term goal in the In logic, two negatives always cancel each other out. On natural language processing community. Whereas philoso- the other hand, in language that is only theoretically the case: phers and linguists have proposed several theories, along she is not unhappy does not mean that she is happy; it means with models to represent the meaning of text, the field of that she is not fully unhappy, but she is not happy either. computational linguistics is still far from doing so automat- Some negated statements carry a positive implicit mean- ically. The ambiguity of natural language, the need to de- ing. For example, cows do not eat meat implies that cows eat tect implicit knowledge, and the demand for commonsense something other than meat. Otherwise, the speaker would knowledge and reasoning are only a few of the difficulties to have stated cows do not eat. A clearer example is the cor- overcome to understand text. We must say that significant rect and yet puzzling statement tables do not eat meat. The progress has been made, especially on detection of semantic sentence sounds unnatural because the underlying positive relations, ontologies and reasoning methods. statement (i.e., tables eat something other than meat) con- Negation is present in all languages and it is always tradicts the fact that tables do not eat. the case that statements are affirmative by default. Nega- Negation can express less than or in between when used in tion is marked and it typically signals something unusual a scalar context. For example, John does not have three chil- or an exception. It may be present in all units of lan- dren probably means that he has either one or two children. guage, e.g., words (incredible), clauses (He doesn’t have Contrasts may use negation to disagree about a statement friends). Negation and its correlates (truth values, lying, and not to negate it. For example, That truck is not big, it is irony, false or contradictory statements) are defining and massive defines the truck as massive, and therefore, big. exclusive characteristics of the human species (Horn 1989; In this paper, we investigate the significance of negation Horn and Kato 2000). Simply put, negation is a process that in semantic representation of natural language. We illus- turns parts of a statement into its opposite. trate the importance of detecting both its scope and focus Negation is fairly well-understood and described in gram- and propose a semantic representation that benefits from fo- mars; the valid ways to express a negation are formulated cus detection. and documented. However, there has not been much work on automatically detecting it, or more importantly, on repre- Related Work senting the semantics of negations from natural language. At first glance, negation might seem easy to deal with. Negation has been widely studied outside of computational One might think that the problem could be reduced to find linguistics. In logic, it is usually the simplest unary operator and it reverses the truth value. The seminal work on negation Copyright c 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial by Horn (1989) presents the main thoughts in philosophy Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. and psychology. We follow him in the next two paragraphs. 228 Two of the most basic philosophical laws put forth by 2009) annotates event mentions exclusively with their de- Aristotle are the Law of Contradiction (LC, it is impossible gree of factuality. to be and not be at the same time) and the Law of Excluded None of the above references aim at detecting or annotat- Middle (LEM, in every case we must either affirm or deny). ing the focus of negation in natural language. To the best of LEM is not always applicable to statements involving nega- our knowledge, researches have not yet targeted this topic. tion of scalar values (e.g., one can deny being cold and not being cold). Philosophers also realized that a negative state- Negation in Natural Language ment can have latent positive meaning, e.g. Socrates is not In this Section we follow Huddleston and Pullum (2002) to well implicitly states that Socrates is alive. describe the characteristics of negation in natural language Psychology has studied the constructs, usage and cogni- with a focus on English language. tive processing of negation. They note that negated state- Unlike affirmative statements, negation is marked by ments are not on equal footing with a positive statement; words (e.g., not, no, never) or affixes (e.g., -n’t, un-). Nega- they are a different and subordinate kind of statement. Actu- tion can interact with other words in special ways. For ally, there is evidence that children acquire negation later example, negated clauses use different connective adjuncts in life than the power to communicate. Psychology also than positive clauses do: neither, nor instead of either, or. confirms the intuitive thought that humans normally com- The so-called negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive items municate in positive terms and reserve negation mostly to (Huddleston and Pullum 2002) include, among many oth- describe unusual or unexpected situations. ers, words starting with any- (anybody, anyone, anywhere, Linguists have found negation a highly complex phe- etc.), the modal auxiliaries dare and need and the grammat- nomenon. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Lan- ical units at all, much and till. Negation in verbs usually guage (Huddleston and Pullum 2002) dedicates over 60 requires an auxiliary; if none is present, the auxiliary do is pages to negation, covering verbal (e.g., he doesn’t agree) inserted (I read the paper vs. I didn’t read the paper). and non-verbal (e.g., Not all of them agree), polarity items We can distinguish four contrasts for negation: (e.g., already, any) and multiple negation. Among oth- Verbal vs. Non-verbal. Verbal if the marker of negation ers, negation interacts with quantifiers and anaphora (Hin- is grammatically associated with the verb (e.g., I did not see tikka 2002). For example, the reference to They is eas- anything at all); non-verbal if it is associated with a depen- ier to solve in (1) than in (2): (1) Some of the students dent of the verb (e.g., I saw nothing at all). passed the exam. They must have studied hard; (2) Not all the students failed the examination. They must have stud- Analytics vs. Synthetic. Analytic if the negation is ied hard. Negation also influences reasoning (Dowty 1994; marked by words whose sole syntactic function is to mark Sanchez´ Valencia 1991). Zeijlstra (2007) analyzes the way negation (e.g. Bill did not go); synthetic if the words have different languages position and form negative elements as some other function as well (e.g., Nobody went to the meet- well as the interpretation of more than one negative element. ing). In the latter example, Nobody marks the negation and Within natural language processing, negation has drawn plays the role of AGENT. attention mainly in sentiment analysis (Wilson, Wiebe, and Clausal vs. Subclausal. Clausal if the negation yields a Hoffmann 2009) and the biomedical domain. The Negation negative clause (She didn’t have a large income); subclausal and Speculation in Natural Language Processing Workshop otherwise (She had a not inconsiderable income) (Morante and Sporleder 2010) targeted negation and specu- Ordinary vs. Metalinguistic. A negation is ordinary if it lation; most contributions specialize in the above subfields. indicates that something is not the case, e.g., (1) She didn’t The CoNLL-2010 Shared Task (Farkas et al. 2010) targeted have lunch with my old man: he couldn’t make it. On the the detection of hedges and their scope. Councill, McDon- other hand, a negation is metalinguistic if it does not dispute ald, and Velikovich (2010) created their own corpus to detect the truth but rather reformulates a statement, e.g., (2) She explicit negations and their scope in a supervised manner.
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