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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
NEGES 2019 Task: Negation in Spanish
Held as part of the evaluation forum IberLEF in the XXXV edition of the International Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN 2019: http://hitz.eus/sepln2019/)
September 24, 2019. Bizkaia Aretoa, Bilbao, Spain
Webpage: http://www.sepln.org/workshops/neges2019/
About the task
Negation is a complex linguistic phenomenon of growing interest in computational linguistics. Detection and treatment of negation is relevant in a wide range of applications, such as information extraction, machine translation or sentiment analysis, where it is crucial to know when a part of the text should have a different meaning due to the presence of negation. In recent years, several challenges and shared tasks have focused on processing negation: NeSp-NLP 2010 (Morante and Sporleder, 2010), CoNLL-2010 share task (Farkas et al., 2010) and SEM 2012 shared task (Morante and Blanco, 2012). However, most of the research on negation has been done for English. Therefore, this task aims to advance the study of this phenomenon in Spanish, the second most widely spoken language in the world and the third most widely used on the Internet. The main objective is to bring together the scientific community that is working on this issue to discuss how this phenomenon is being addressed, what are the main problems encountered, as well as sharing resources and tools aimed at negation in Spanish.
This task was also organized last year as a workshop, NEGES: Workshop on Negation in Spanish (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2018a; Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2018b), held as part of the XXXIV edition of the International Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN 2018). This year, it is presented in IberLEF (Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum), collocated with SEPLN 2019 Conference, with the aim of joining forces with other researchers to create a reference forum in Spanish with tasks of relevance to processing some of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula.
Subtasks
Subtask A: Negation cues detection
The aim of this subtask is to advance in the identification of negation cues automatically. To do this, participants must develop a system able to identify all the negation cues present in a document. For example, in sentence (1) the systems will have to identify three negation cues: i) No, ii) en mi vida and iii) sin.
(1) No recomiendo el libro, en mi vida he leído un libro peor, sin sentido.
The SFU ReviewSP-NEG corpus (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2018c) will be used to train and test the systems. The quality of the dataset was measured in terms of Kappa coefficient being of 0.97 for negation cues. A detailed discussion of the main sources of disagreements can be found in (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2016).
Subtask B: Role of negation in sentiment analysis
It is a specific task whose objective is to evaluate the role of negation in sentiment analysis. In this case, participants should develop a system that uses the negation information contained in the SFU ReviewSP-NEG corpus (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2018c) to improve the task of polarity classification. Systems will have to classify each review as positive or negative using a negation processing heuristic.
The SFU ReviewSP-NEG corpus (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2018c) will be used to train and test the systems. The quality of the dataset was measured in terms of Kappa coefficient being of 0.97 for negation cues, 0.94 for scopes, 0.95 for events, 0.95 for the type of negation structure and 0.99 for the type of change in the polarity. A detailed discussion of the main sources of disagreements can be found in (Jiménez-Zafra et al., 2016).
Important dates
- February 18, 2019: Registration open
- February 25, 2019: Training and development sets released
- April 12, 2019: Test set released
- April 26, 2019 (23:59 UTC+2): Submission end
- May 10, 2019: Results posted
- May 24, 2019 (23:59 UTC+2): Deadline for paper submission
- June 7, 2019: Notification of acceptance
- June 21, 2019 (23:59 UTC+2): Deadline for camera ready paper submission
- September 24, 2019: IberLEF, SEPLN 2019, Bilbao (Spain)
Papers submission
Format details will be communicated shortly, according to the specifications of IberLEF organizers.
Organizing comittee
Salud María Jiménez Zafra, sjzafra [at] ujaen.es (Universidad de Jaén, España)
Maite Martín Valdivia, maite [at] ujaen.es (Universidad de Jaén, España)
Noa Cruz Díaz, contact [at] noacruz.com (Savana Médica, Madrid, España)
Roser Morante, r.morantevalejo [at] vu.nl (VU Amsterdam, Países Bajos)
Program comittee
Altuna, Begoña (Unversidad del País Vasco)
Bel, Nuria (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, España)
Blanco, Eduardo (University of North Texas, USA)
Carrillo de Albornoz, Jorge (UNED, España)
Casillas, Arantza (Universidad del País Vasco, España)
Cruz Díaz, Noa (Savana Médica, Madrid, España)
Fernández-Gavilanes, Milagros (Universidad de Vigo, España)
García Méndez, Silvia (Universidad de Vigo, España)
Jiménez Zafra, Salud María (Universidad de Jaén, España)
Maña, Manuel (Universidad de Huelva, España)
Marimón, Montserrat (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, España)
Martí, M. Antonia (Universitat de Barcelona, España)
Martín Valdivia, Maite (Universidad de Jaén, España)
Martínez, Paloma (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, España)
Martínez Barco, Patricio (Universidad de Alicante, España)
Martínez-Cámara, Eugenio (Universidad de Granada, España)
Morante, Roser (VU Amsterdam, Países Bajos)
Segura, Isabel (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, España)
Taboada, Maite (Simon Fraser University, Canadá)
Taulé, Mariona (Universitat de Barcelona, España)
Vilares, David (Universidad de la Coruña, España)
Vivaldi, Jorge (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, España)
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