Automatic Extraction of Lexico-Syntactic Patterns for Detection of Negation and Speculation Scopes

Detecting the linguistic scope of negated and speculated information in text is an important Information Extraction task. This paper presents ScopeFinder, a linguistically motivated rule-based system for the detection of negation and speculation scopes. The system rule set consists of lexico-syntactic patterns automatically extracted from a corpus annotated with negation/speculation cues and their scopes (the BioScope corpus). The system performs on par with state-of-the-art machine learning systems. Additionally, the intuitive and linguistically motivated rules will allow for manual adaptation of the rule set to new domains and corpora.