Revisiting Syntax-Based Approach in Negation Scope Resolution

Asahi Yoshida, Yoshihide Kato, Shigeki Matsubara

Abstract: Negation scope resolution is the process of detecting the negated part of a sentence. Unlike the syntax-based approach employed in previous research, state-of-the-art methods performed better without the explicit use of syntactic structure. This work revisits the syntax-based approach and re-evaluates the effectiveness of syntactic structure in negation scope resolution. We replace the parser utilized in the prior works with state-of-the-art parsers and modify the syntax-based heuristic rules. The experimental results demonstrate that the simple modifications enhance the performance of the prior syntax-based method to the same level as state-of-the-art end-to-end neural-based methods.