Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:32:43.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Focus of negation: Its identification in Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2020

Mariona Taulé Open the ORCID record for Mariona Taulé [Opens in a new window] ,
Montserrat Nofre Open the ORCID record for Montserrat Nofre [Opens in a new window] ,
Mónica González  and
Maria Antònia Martí
Mariona Taulé*
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona, CLiC-UBICS, Gran Via 585, 08007Barcelona, Spain
Montserrat Nofre
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona, CLiC-UBICS, Gran Via 585, 08007Barcelona, Spain
Mónica González
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona, CLiC-UBICS, Gran Via 585, 08007Barcelona, Spain
Maria Antònia Martí
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona, CLiC-UBICS, Gran Via 585, 08007Barcelona, Spain
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: mtaule@ub.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article describes the criteria for identifying the focus of negation in Spanish. This work involved an in-depth linguistic analysis of the focus of negation through which we identified some 10 different types of criteria that account for a wide variety of constructions containing negation. These criteria account for all the cases that appear in the NewsCom corpus and were assessed in the annotation of this corpus. The NewsCom corpus consists of 2955 comments posted in response to 18 different news articles from online newspapers. The NewsCom corpus contains 2965 negative structures with their corresponding negation marker, scope, and focus. This is the first corpus annotated with focus in Spanish and it is freely available. It is a valuable resource that can be used both for the training and evaluation of systems that aim to automatically detect the scope and focus of negation and for the linguistic analysis of negation grounded in real data.

Keywords

Focus of negationCorpus annotation
Type
Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 131 - 152
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altuna, B., Minard, A. and Speranza, M. (2017). The scope and focus of negation: A complete annotation framework for Italian. In Proceedings of the Workshop Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles, SemBER, pp. 34–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anand, P. and Martell, C. (2012). Annotating the focus of negation in terms of questions under discussion. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 65–69.Google Scholar
Banjade, R. and Rus, V. (2016). DT-Neg: Tutorial dialogues annotated for negation scope and focus in context. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Banjade, R., Niraula, N.B. and Rus, V. (2016). Towards detecting intra- and inter-sentential negation scope and focus in dialogue. In The Twenty-Ninth International Flairs Conference.Google Scholar
Blanco, E. and Moldovan, D. (2011). Semantic representation of negation using focus detection. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 581–589.Google Scholar
Blanco, E. and Moldovan, D. (2014). Retrieving implicit positive meaning from negated statements. Natural Language Engineering 20(4), 501–535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20(1), 37–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demonte, V. and Bosque, I. (1999). Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. España: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Española, Real Academia (2009) Nueva gramática de la lengua española. España: Espasa libros.Google Scholar
Francis, E. and Taboada, M. (2017). Guidelines for Annotating Negation, Scope and Focus . Discourse processing La., Canada: Simon Fraser University.Google Scholar
Guzzi, E., Taulé, M. and Martí, M.A. (2017). Criterios para la detección del foco de la negación en español. In Workshop NEGES-2017, SEPLN-2017.Google Scholar
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiménez-Zafra, S.M., Taulé, M., Martín-Valdivia, M.T., Ureña-López, L.A. and Martí, M.A. (2018). SFU review SP-NEG: A Spanish corpus annotated with negation for sentiment analysis. A typology of negation patterns. Language Resources and Evaluation 52(2), 533–569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolhatkar, V., Wu, H., Cavasso, L., Francis, E., Shukla, K. and Taboada, M. (2019) The SFU opinion and comments corpus: A corpus for the analysis of online news comments. Corpus Pragmatics, pp. 1–36. Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
Konstantinova, N., De Sousa, S.C.M., Cruz, N.P., Maña, M.J., Taboada, M. and Mitkov, R. (2012). A review corpus annotated for negation, speculation and their scope. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 3190–3195.Google Scholar
Landis, J.R. and Koch, G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33(1), 159–174.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martí, M. A., Taulé, M., Nofre, M., Marsó, L., Martín-Valdivia, M.T. and Jiménez-Zafra, S.M. (2016). La negación en español: análisis y tipologa de patrones de negación. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 57, 41–48.Google Scholar
Matsuyoshi, S., Otsuki, R. and Fukumoto, F. (2014) Annotating the focus of negation in Japanese text. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 1743–1750.Google Scholar
Minard, A., Marchetti, A. and Speranza, M. (2014) Event factuality in Italian: Annotation of news stories from the ita-timebank. In First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 260–264.Google Scholar
Minard, A., Speranza, M. and Caselli, T. (2016). The EVALITA 2016 event factuality annotation task (FactA). In Proceedings of the 5th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian /EVALITA 2016), p. 32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morante, R., Schrauwen, S. and Daelemans, W. (2011). Annotation of negation cues and their scope: Guidelines v1. Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Technical Report Series, CTRS-003. Google Scholar
Morante, R. and Blanco, E. (2012) * SEM 2012 shared task: Resolving the scope and focus of negation. In * SEM 2012: The First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics–Volume 1: Proceedings of the Main Conference and the Shared Task, and Volume 2: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012), vol. 1, pp. 265–274.Google Scholar
Morante, R. and Daelemans, W. (2012) ConanDoyle-neg: Annotation of negation in Conan Doyle stories. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Istanbul.Google Scholar
Padró, L. and Stanilovsky, E. (2012) Freeling 3.0: Towards wider multilinguality. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 2473–2479.Google Scholar
Palmer, M., Gildea, D. and Kingsbury, P. (2005). The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics 31(1), 71–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rooth, M. (1996). Focus. In Lappin S. (ed), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. London: Blackwell, pp. 271–297.Google Scholar
Taulé, M., Martí, M.A. and Recasens, M. (2008). AnCora: Multilevel annotated corpora for Catalan and Spanish. In Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 96–101.Google Scholar
Vincze, V., Szarvas, G., Farkas, R., Móra, G. and Csirik, J. (2008). The BioScope corpus: Biomedical texts annotated for uncertainty, negation and their scopes. BMC Bioinformatics 9(11), 1.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zou, B., Zhu, Q. and Zhou, G. (2014). Negation focus identification with contextual discourse information. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 1. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 522–530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar