Journal of Natural Language Engineering Special Issue on Processing Negation

JNLE-PN 2020


Artificial Intelligence





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First Call for Papers
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Negation is a complex phenomenon that "relates an expression e to another expression with a meaning that is in some way opposed to the meaning of e" (Horn and Wansing, 2017). Cognitively, negation "involves some comparison between a real situation lacking some particular element and an imaginal situation that does not lack it" (Lawler 2010). In natural language, negation functions as an operator, similar to quantifiers and modals. As an operator, one of the main characteristics of negation is that it has scope, thus it affects surrounding elements. These elements may be implicitly or explicitly stated, and they may belong to a different clause than the negation.
Theoretical works tell us that negation is present in all human languages, and that it allows for the uniquely human capacities of denial, contradiction, misrepresentation, lying, and irony (Horn and Wansing, 2017). Grammars detail the valid ways of creating negated statements and study negation in terms of its scope and focus (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002). Previous work reveals that negation is ubiquitous: Tottie (1991) reports that negation is twice as frequent in spoken than written language (27.6 and 12.8 per 1,000 words respectively), over 12% of concepts in health records are identified as negated (Elkin et al., 2005), and 19% of sentences in product reviews contain negation (Councill et al., 2010).
Within natural language processing, approaches to processing negation target primarily scope and focus detection (Morante and Blanco, 2012). There have also been shallow heuristic-based approaches (Hu and Liu, 2004), and work tuned to the biological and medical domain (Miller et al., 2017). This special issue is devoted to advances in processing negation from a computational perspective.
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Topics
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We invite submissions describing novel work on any aspect related to processing negation from a computational perspective. We welcome articles describing, among others, theoretical insights, annotation schemes and corpora, empirical studies on processing and representing the meaning of negation, and applications that benefit from processing negation. The special issue is not limited to any particular human language. Submissions exploring the challenges posed by negation and proposing solutions for an application (for example, machine translation, sentiment analysis, natural language inference) are encouraged.
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Annotation schemes for negation: syntactic and semantic approaches
- Annotating negation: stand-alone corpora and incorporating negation annotations into existing semantic frameworks (semantic roles, frames, AMR, UCCA, logic forms, etc.)
- Processing all negations types for NLP: verbal and non-verbal, synthetic and analytic, metalinguistic, etc.
- Learning to determine the scope and focus of negation
- Focus granularity and the need to account for uncertainty
- Processing negation for specific NLP tasks and applications: dialogue systems, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, text mining, information extraction, semantic relation extraction and inference, machine translation, paraphrasing, summarization, etc.
- Negation and natural language inference: recognizing entailments and determining textual similarity when negation is present
- Negation and its relationship with modality, factuality, subjectivity and related phenomena
- Generating text containing negation
- Negation across domains and genres: newswire, scientific texts, legal documents, novels, economy texts, etc.
- Negation in the biological and medical domains
- Negation in user-generated content: social media, online forums, etc.
- Multilingual aspects: universal negation processing, exploiting parallel corpora, etc.
- Negation and implicit meaning: what do sentences containing negation really mean?
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Important Dates
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Call for Papers December 1, 2018
Letter of intent (not required) March 1, 2019
Submission deadline May 15, 2019
First notification July 15, 2019
Submission of revised versions September 15, 2019
Final notification November 20, 2019
Camera-ready submission anuary 15, 2020
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Submission Instructions
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Letter of Intent
We request you send a letter of intent (1 page maximum) explaining the contents of your intended submission by March 1, 2019. The letter of intent is not required: authors may submit an article without submitting a letter of intent, and the contents of the submission do not need to match the explanation in the letter of intent. Letters of intent will not be reviewed and will be used only for planning purposes.
Please send your letter of intent to the guest editors. You will receive an email confirmation within a week. If you would like informal feedback about the suitability of your planned submission to the special issue, please indicate so in your email.
Submissions
Articles submitted to the Special issue on Negation must adhere to the Journal of Natural Language Engineering Instructions for Contributors (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/natural-language-engineering/inf... [2]. Articles will be processed via the Journal of Natural Language Engineering submission system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nle [3]). Please register as an author and select the article type "Special Issue: Processing Negation".
As a general rule, articles are expected to be between 20 and 35 pages long, and at least 15 pages long. These page lengths are only suggestions, not requirements.
We expect to open the submission website in March 2019. Additional details will be announced closer to the deadline.
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Guest Editors
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Eduardo Blanco - University of North Texas (eduardo.blanco@unt.edu [4])
Roser Morante - University of Amsterdam (r.morantevallejo@uva.nl [5])
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Guest Editorial Board
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Emily Bender - University of Washington
Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz - Universidad Nacional de Eduación a Distancia
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe - The Ohio State University
Gunnel Tottie - University of Zurich
Aurelie Herbelot - University of Trento
Halil Kilicoglu - National Institutes of Health
Lori Levin - Carnegie Mellon University
Wei Lu - Singapore University of Technology and Design
Lluís Màrquez - Amazon
Alessandro Moschitti- Amazon
Lilja Øvrelid - University of Oslo
Alexis Palmer - University of North Texas
Kirk Roberts - University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Josef Ruppenhofer - Leibniz ScienceCampus
Erik Velldal - University of Oslo
Michael Wiegand - Saarland University
Stephen Wu - Oregon Health and Science University
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Contact
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Questions? Contact the guest editors with any questions regarding the special issue.
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References
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Isaac Councill, Ryan McDonald, and Leonid Velikovich. 2010. What's great and what's not: Learning to classify the scope of negation for improved sentiment analysis. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing (NeSp-NLP).
Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, Brent A. Bauer, Casey S. Husser, William Carruth, Larry R. Bergstrom, and Dietlind L. Wahner-Roedler. 2005. A controlled trial of automated classification of negation from clinical notes. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 5(13).
Laurence R. Horn and Heinrich Wansing. 2017. Negation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Minqing Hu and Bing Liu. 2004. Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews. In Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD).
Rodney D. Huddleston and Geoffrey K Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.
John Lawler. 2010. Negation and negative polarity. In P. C. Hogan, editor, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge University Press, pages 554-555.
Timothy A. Miller, Steven Bethard, Hadi Amiri, and Guergana K. Savova. 2017. In Proceedings of the SIGBioMed Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP).
Roser Morante and Eduardo Blanco. 2012. *SEM 2012 Shared Task: Resolving the Scope and Focus of Negation. In Proceedings of the First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM).
Gunnel Tottie. 1991. Negation in English Speech and Writing: A Study in Variation. Academic Press, New York.
Read more: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/jnle-special-issue-processing-negation
[1] http://www.cse.unt.edu/~blanco/jnle_si_negation/
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/natural-language-engineering/information/instructions-contributors
[3] https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nle
[4] mailto:eduardo.blanco@unt.edu
[5] mailto:r.morantevallejo@uva.nl