Negation handling for sentiment analysis task: approaches and performance analysis

Abstract

Negation plays an essential role in sentiment analysis within natural language processing (NLP). Its integration involves two key aspects: identifying the scope of negation and incorporating this information into the sentiment model. Before delving into scope detection, the specific negation cue must be identified, with explicit and implicit negation cues being the two main types. Various methodologies, such as rule-based, machine learning, and hybrid approaches, address the negation scope detection challenge. Strategies for leveraging negation information in sentiment models encompass heuristic polarity modification, feature space augmentation, end-to-end approach, and hierarchical multi-task learning. Notably, there is a need for more studies addressing implicit negation cue detection, even within the state-of-the-art bidirectional encoder representation for transformers (BERT) approach. Some studies have employed reinforcement learning and hybrid techniques to address the implicit negation problem. Further exploration, particularly through a hybrid and multi-task learning approach, is warranted to make potential contributions to the nuanced challenges of handling negation in sentiment analysis, especially in complex sentence structures.