Disambiguation of Verbal Shifters

Abstract

Negation is an important contextual phenomenon that needs to be addressed in sentiment analysis. Next to common negation function words, such as "not" or "none", there is also a considerably large class of negation content words, also referred to as shifters, such as the verbs "diminish", "reduce" or "reverse". However, many of these shifters are ambiguous. For instance, "spoil" as in "spoil your chance" reverses the polarity of the positive polar expression "chance" while in "spoil your loved ones", no negation takes place. We present a supervised learning approach to disambiguating verbal shifters. Our approach takes into consideration various features, particularly generalization features.

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