Research on Chinese negation and speculation: corpus annotation and identification

Abstract

Identifying negative or speculative narrative fragments from facts is crucial for deep understanding on natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we firstly construct a Chinese corpus which consists of three sub-corpora from different resources. We also present a general framework for Chinese negation and speculation identification. In our method, first, we propose a feature-based sequence labeling model to detect the negative or speculative cues. In addition, a cross-lingual cue expansion strategy is proposed to increase the coverage in cue detection. On this basis, this paper presents a new syntactic structure-based framework to identify the linguistic scope of a negative or speculative cue, instead of the traditional chunking-based framework. Experimental results justify the usefulness of our Chinese corpus and the appropriateness of our syntactic structure-based framework which has showed significant improvement over the state-of-the-art on Chinese negation and speculation identification.

Keywords

negation / speculation / cue detection / scope resolution / Chinese corpus

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2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg