Negation and Speculation Detection

Negation and speculation detection is an emerging topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers, and there is clearly a lack of relevant textbooks and survey texts. This book aims to define negation and speculation from a natural language processing perspective, to explain the need for processing these phenomena, to summarise existing research on processing negation and speculation, to provide a list of resources and tools, and to speculate about future developments in this research area. An advantage of this book is that it will not only provide an overview of the state of the art in negation and speculation detection, but will also introduce newly developed data sets and scripts. It will be useful for students of natural language processing subjects who are interested in understanding this task in more depth and for researchers with an interest in these phenomena in order to improve performance in other natural language processing tasks.

Haoda Feng, Bohai University, P. R. China, in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 8 October 2019:
Overall, the book is structured in a logical and clear manner and is written in precise and concise academic language. The fact that the volume under review is not ‘bulky’ (i.e. only ninety-five pages in length) does not detract from its value. Readers would feel like sitting vis-a`-vis with the authors while reading the book, and therefore it could be used as either a classroom text or a supplement reading. Nevertheless, the book may require readers to have basic statistics knowledge and data analytic techniques. Particularly, it may appeal to those who specialize in quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, NLP, corpus linguistics, corpus-based translation studies, and so forth. Those who attempt to employ quantitative approaches to investigate negative and speculative language in other domains would also find this book useful. For these reasons, Cruz Díaz and Maña López’s present work is a great contribution to the field of quantitative studies and is well worth recommending.