Negation, Contrast and Contradiction in Text Processing

Sanda Harabagiu, Andrew Hickl, Finley Lacatusu

This paper describes a framework for recognizing contradictions between multiple text sources by relying on three forms of linguistic information: (a) negation; (b) antonymy; and (c) semantic and pragmatic information associated with the discourse relations. Two views of contradictions are considered, in which a novel method of recognizing contrast and of finding antonymies are described. Contradictions are used for informing fusion operators in question answering. Our experiments show promising results for the detection of contradictions.

Subjects: 13. Natural Language Processing