Annotating the Focus of Negation in terms of Questions Under Discussion

What it is about

The paper re-examines a corpus of focus of negation (PB-FOC, from the *SEM 2012 shared task). The original annotators took focus to be the part of a negated sentence that suggests a positive alternative. The authors argue that this mixes focus with scalar implicature, neg-raising and stress. They propose that focus is tied to a question under discussion (QUD): the focus is the answer to the implicit question that the negation addresses. They re-annotated 2,304 development sentences. The focus-marking rate falls from 74% in PB-FOC to 50% in the new annotation. Annotators found no focus in 631 cases where PB-FOC had some, and found focus in 59 cases where PB-FOC had none. Agreement with the QUD model is reported as kappa above 0.80. The largest drops are for the A1 and AM-MNR roles.

Ideas

• I1. Implement the QUD test as a rule in prag: for a negated clause, generate the implicit question from the focus candidate and reject the focus if the question is uninformative. The paper shows the filter for "possession" verbs (have, contain) and for idioms.
• I2. Reject focus on scalar quantifiers that lie outside the negation's scope, and on neg-raising verbs such as "believe", using small lexicons in en/src/dict.rs. Count each rejection with its rule.
• I3. Measure the over-marking rate of any focus rule on negated sentences, against a hand-labelled sample, and report it by Propbank-like role, as the paper does.
• I4. Use the paper's error categories (uninformative question, idiom, biased question) as the labels for a small error log, so each new rule is checked against them.

For Mova

The chapter is 27. Negation. The code is prag/src/infer.rs and the rule files for focus. The measure is focus precision on a hand-labelled set, with the kappa between two annotators as the ceiling. The corpus is NC-licensed, so use it for evaluation only.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{anand2012annotating,
  title = {{Annotating the Focus of Negation in terms of Questions Under Discussion}},
  author = {Anand, Pranav and Martell, Craig},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W12-3808/}
}

References

8 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Eduardo Blanco and Dan Moldovan. 2011. Semantic Representation of Negation Using Focus Detection. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT 2011), Portland, OR, USA. find
2. Charles Filmore. 1963. The position of embedding transformations in grammar. Word, 19:208–231. find
3. Jan Robert Gajewski. 2007. Neg-raising and polarity. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30:289–328. find
4. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullman. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Langauge. Cambridge University Press. find
5. Ray Jackendoff. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. find
6. Nirit Kadmon. 2001. Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition, and Focus. Wiley-Blackwell. find
7. Craige Roberts. 1996. Information structure: Towards an integrated theory of formal pragmatics. In Jae-Hak Yoon and Andreas Kathol, editors, OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 49: Papers in Semantics, pages 91–136. The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics. find
8. Mats Rooth. 1996. Focus. In Shalom Lappin, editor, The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, pages 271–298. Blackwell, Oxford. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/anand-2012-annotating-focus-negation-terms-questions/