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Annotating the Focus of Negation in Japanese Text

This paper proposes an annotation scheme for the focus of negation in Japanese text. Negation has its scope and the focus within the scope. The scope of negation is the part of the sentence that is negated; the focus is the part of the scope that is most prominently or explicitly negated. In natural language processing, correct interpretation of negated statements requires precise detection of the focus of negation in the statements. As a foundation for developing a negation focus detector for Japanese, we have annotated textdata of “Rakuten Travel: User review data” and the newspaper subcorpus of the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese” with labels proposed in our annotation scheme. We report 1,327 negation cues and the foci in the corpora, and present classification of these foci based on syntactic types and semantic types. We also propose a system for detecting the focus of negation in Japanese using 16 heuristic rules and report the performance of the system.