This paper details LTG-Oslo team's participation in the sentiment track of the NEGES 2019 evaluation campaign. We participated in the task with a hierarchical multi-task network, which used shared lower-layers in a deep BiLSTM to predict negation, while the higher layers were dedicated to predicting document-level sentiment. The multi-task component shows promise as a way to incorporate information on negation into deep neural sentiment classifiers, despite the fact that the absolute results on the test set were relatively low for a binary classification task.
The first approaches to detecting negation scope for sentiment used heuristics, such as assuming all tokens between a negation cue and the next punctuation mark are in scope @cite_20 . However, this simplification does not work well on noisy text, such as tweets, or texts that use more complex syntax, such as those in the political domain.
@cite_20
2252065932 1782003667 1961993270 2250374929
The paper describes the first sophisticated negation scope detection system for Twitter sentiment analysis. The system has been evaluated both on existing corpora from other domains and on a corpus of English Twitter data (tweets) annotated for negation. It produces better results than what has been reported in other domains and improves the performance on tweets containing negation when incorporated into a state-of-the-art Twitter sentiment analyser. This paper reports on a simple system for resolving the scope of negation in the closed track of the *SEM 2012 Shared Task. Cue detection is performed using regular expression rules extracted from the training data. Both scope tokens and negated event tokens are resolved using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) sequence tagger -- namely the SimpleTagger library in the MALLET machine learning toolkit. The full negation F1 score obtained for the task evaluation is 48.09 (P=74.02 , R=35.61 ) which ranks this system fourth among the six submitted for the closed track. Recognizing negative and speculative information is highly relevant for sentiment analysis. This paper presents a machine-learning approach to automatically detect this kind of information in the review domain. The resulting system works in two steps: in the first pass, negation speculation cues are identified, and in the second phase the full scope of these cues is determined. The system is trained and evaluated on the Simon Fraser University Review corpus, which is extensively used in opinion mining. The results show how the proposed method outstrips the baseline by as much as roughly 20 in the negation cue detection and around 13 in the scope recognition, both in terms of F1. In speculation, the performance obtained in the cue prediction phase is close to that obtained by a human rater carrying out the same task. In the scope detection, the results are also promising and represent a substantial improvement on the baseline up by roughly 10 . A detailed error analysis is also provided. The extrinsic evaluation shows that the correct identification of cues and scopes is vital for the task of sentiment analysis. Negation words, such as no and not, play a fundamental role in modifying sentiment of textual expressions. We will refer to a negation word as the negator and the text span within the scope of the negator as the argument. Commonly used heuristics to estimate the sentiment of negated expressions rely simply on the sentiment of argument (and not on the negator or the argument itself). We use a sentiment treebank to show that these existing heuristics are poor estimators of sentiment. We then modify these heuristics to be dependent on the negators and show that this improves prediction. Next, we evaluate a recently proposed composition model (, 2013) that relies on both the negator and the argument. This model learns the syntax and semantics of the negator’s argument with a recursive neural network. We show that this approach performs better than those mentioned above. In addition, we explicitly incorporate the prior sentiment of the argument and observe that this information can help reduce fitting errors.