NegPar: a parallel corpus annotated for negation

Although the existence of English corpora annotated for negation has allowed for extensive work on monolingual negation detection, little is understood on how negation-related phenomena translate across languages. The current study fills this gap by presenting NegPar, the first English-Chinese parallel corpus annotated for negation in the narrative domain (a collection of stories from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes). While we followed the annotation guidelines in the ConanDoyleNeg corpus (Morante and Daelemans, 2012), we reannotated certain scope-related phenomena to ensure more consistent and interpretable semantic representation. To both ease the annotation process and analyze how similar negation is signaled in the two languages, we experimented with first projecting the annotations from English and then manually correcting the projection output in Chinese. Results show that projecting negation via word-alignment offers limited help to the annotation process, as negation can be rendered in different ways across languages.