engleski

Negation of Croatian nouns

The purpose of this paper is to describe a morphological grammar for recognizing negation of a noun and annotating its polarity accordingly. Not all nouns can be negated on the morphological level. For example, nouns like ‘activity’ and ‘knowledge’ (aktivnost, znanje) can have negatives (neaktivnost, neznanje respectfully), but the same is not the case for nouns such as ‘battle’ or ‘table’ (bitka or stol). The most common and frequent Croatian prefix for negation of nouns is ‘ne-’ although several more are used either of Slavic (‘be-’, ‘bez-’) or Latin origin (‘anti-’, ‘dis-’). In some cases, negated nouns actually denote positive concepts, whereas their non- negated counterparts are used for expressing concepts with negative connotations. For this purpose, all the nouns in NooJ dictionary, that may have nouns in both polarities, are provided with [Polarity = pos] or [Polarity = neg] marker. This information is used in the grammar to switch the polarity of the opposite noun after the insertion of a negative prefix. The grammar is tested on different types of corpora and results are discussed.

Negation ; Nouns ; Prefixes of negation ; Morphological grammar ; NLP ; Croatian ; NooJ

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