Building a Dictionary of Affixal Negations

This paper discusses the need for a dictionary of affixal negations and regular antonyms to facilitate their automatic detection in text. Without such a dictionary, affixal negations are very difficult to detect. In addition, we show that the set of affixal negations is not homogeneous, and that different NLP tasks may require different subsets. A dictionary can store the subtypes of affixal negations, making it possible to select a certain subset or to make inferences on the basis of these subtypes. We take a first step towards creating an affixal negation dictionary by annotating all direct antonym pairs in WordNet using an existing typology of affixal negations. By highlighting some of the issues that were encountered in this annotation experiment, we hope to provide some insights into the necessary steps of building a negation dictionary.