D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection

Leon Lukas Hammerla, Andy Lücking, Carolin Reinert, Alexander Mehler


Abstract
Despite the communicative importance of negation, its detection remains challenging. Previous approaches perform poorly in out-of-domain scenarios, and progress outside of English has been slow due to a lack of resources and robust models. To address this gap, we present D-Neg: a syntax-aware graph reasoning model based on a transformer that incorporates syntactic embeddings by attention-gating. D-Neg uses graph attention to represent syntactic structures, emulating the effectiveness of rule-based dependency approaches for negation detection. We train D-Neg using 7 English resources and their translations into 10 languages, all aligned at the annotation level. We conduct an evaluation of all these datasets in in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Our work represents a significant advance in negation detection, enabling more effective cross-lingual research.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.89
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1432–1454
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.89/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Leon Lukas Hammerla, Andy Lücking, Carolin Reinert, and Alexander Mehler. 2025. D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1432–1454, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection (Hammerla et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.89.pdf