Carolin Reinert
2025
D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection
Leon Lukas Hammerla
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Andy Lücking
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Carolin Reinert
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Alexander Mehler
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
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.