自然语言文本中存在大量否定语义表达,否定焦点识别任务作为更细粒度的否定语义分析,近年来开始受到自然语言处理学者的关注。该任务旨在识别句子中被否定词修饰和强调的文本片段,其对自然语言处理的下游任务,如情感分析、观点挖掘等具有重要意义。与英语相比,目前面向汉语的否定焦点识别研究彶展缓慢,其主要原因是尚未有中文数据集为模型提供训练和测试数据。为解决上述问题,本文在汉语否定与不确定语料库上进行了否定焦点的标注工作,初步探索了否定焦点在汉语上的语言现象,并构建了一个包含5,762个样本的数据集。同时,本文还提出了一个基于神经网络模型的基线系统,为后续相关研究提供参照。

Negation is a universal but complicated linguistic phenomenon, which has received considerable attention from the NLP community over the last decade, since a negated statement often carries both an explicit negative focus and implicit positive meanings. For the sake of understanding a negated statement, it is critical to precisely detect the negative focus in context. However, how to capture contextual information for negative focus detection is still an open challenge. To well address this, we come up with an attention-based neural network to model contextual information. In particular, we introduce a framework which consists of a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network and a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) layer to effectively encode the order information and the long-range context dependency in a sentence. Moreover, we design two types of attention mechanisms, word-level contextual attention and topic-level contextual attention, to take advantage of contextual information across sentences from both the word perspective and the topic perspective, respectively. Experimental results on the SEM’12 shared task corpus show that our approach achieves the best performance on negative focus detection, yielding an absolute improvement of 2.11% over the state-of-the-art. This demonstrates the great effectiveness of the two types of contextual attention mechanisms.