Annotating Negation and Speculation: the Case of the Review Domain
N. A. Konstantinova, Sheila C. M. de Sousa · 2011
The paper presents the annotation of negation and speculation which is important for many NLP applications. Unlike previous research focusing on the medical domain, we investigate the review domain and attempt to annotate the SFU Review Corpus. In order to guarantee consistent annotation, we develop specific guidelines. Given the lack of research into annotation in the review domain, we explore the possibility of adapting the existing BioScope guidelines for the domain of interest. In order to reveal cases that need additional investigation, initially a small part of the corpus was annotated and this information was used for developing the guidelines. The paper describes the general principles our guidelines are based on and discusses differences with those in Bio-Scope. It discusses the cases which were difficult to annotate. We include some insight into future work in order to improve the annotation process as well. 1