Fine-Grained Focus for Pinpointing Positive Implicit Meaning from Negated Statements

Eduardo Blanco and Dan Moldovan
Lymba Corporation


Abstract

Negated statements often carry positive implicit meaning. Regardless of the semantic representation one adopts, pinpointing the positive concepts within a negated statement is needed in order to encode the statement's meaning. In this paper, novel ideas to reveal positive implicit meaning using focus of negation are presented. The concept of granularity of focus is introduced and justified. New annotation and features to detect fine-grained focus are discussed and results reported.