Annotating the Focus of Negation in terms of Questions Under Discussion
Pranav Anand, Craig H. Martell · 2012
Blanco & Moldovan (Blanco and Moldovan, 2011) have empirically demonstrated that negated sentences often convey implicit pos-itive inferences, or focus, and that these in-ferences are both human annotatable and ma-chine learnable. Concentrating on their anno-tation process, this paper argues that the focus-based implicit positivity should be separated from concepts of scalar implicature and neg-raising, as well as the placement of stress. We show that a model making these distinctions clear and which incorporates the pragmatic notion of question under discussion yields κ rates above.80, but that it substantially de-flates the rates of focus of negation in text. 1