Automatic Extraction of Lexico-Syntactic Patterns for Detection of Negation and Speculation Scopes

Emilia Apostolova1,  Noriko Tomuro1,  Dina Demner-Fushman2
1DePaul University, 2National Library of Medicine


Abstract

Detecting the linguistic scope of negated and speculated information in text is an important Information Extraction task. This paper presents ScopeFinder, a linguistically motivated rule-based system for the detection of negation and speculation scopes. The system rule set consists of lexico-syntactic patterns automatically extracted from a corpus annotated with negation/speculation cues and their scopes (the BioScope corpus). The system performs on par with state-of-the-art machine learning systems. Additionally, the intuitive and linguistically motivated rules will allow for manual adaptation of the rule set to new domains and corpora.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2049.pdf