Extending the NegEx lexicon for multiple languages

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2013:192:677-81.

Abstract

We translated an existing English negation lexicon (NegEx) to Swedish, French, and German and compared the lexicon on corpora from each language. We observed Zipf's law for all languages, i.e., a few phrases occur a large number of times, and a large number of phrases occur fewer times. Negation triggers "no" and "not" were common for all languages; however, other triggers varied considerably. The lexicon is available in OWL and RDF format and can be extended to other languages. We discuss the challenges in translating negation triggers to other languages and issues in representing multilingual lexical knowledge.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • France
  • Germany
  • Medical Records Systems, Computerized*
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Semantics*
  • Sweden
  • Terminology as Topic*
  • Translating*
  • United States
  • Vocabulary, Controlled*