Inferring the scope of negation in biomedical documents

Abstract

In the last few years negation detection systems for biomedical texts have been developed successfully. In this paper we present a system that finds and annotates the scope of negation in English sentences. It infers which words are affected by negations by browsing dependency syntactic structures. Thus, firstly a greedy algorithm detects negation cues, like no or not. And secondly the scope of these negation cues is computed. We tested the system over the Bioscope corpus, annotated with negation, obtaining competitive results. The system presented in this paper can be accessed via web. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.