Speculation and negation annotation in natural language texts: what the case of BioScope might (not) reveal

Veronika Vincze

Abstract: In information extraction, it is of key importance to distinguish between facts and uncertain or negated information. In other words, IE applications have to treat sentences / clauses containing uncertain or negated information differently from factual information that is why the development of hedge and negation detection systems has received much interest -- e.g. the objective of the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task was also to develop hedge detection systems (Farkas et al., 2010). For the training and evaluation of such systems, corpora annotated for negation and speculation are necessary.