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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
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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
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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