Transformation of two-dimensional negation in natural languages: the semantic structure of negative sentences

Abstract

It is important foundation of natural language processing to formalize accurately various kinds of knowledge in natural language. The semantic knowledge of negative sentences was discussed from the view of semantic structure. The negative sentences in natural languages have the 2-dimensional negation transformation structure: negation objects and negation types. The negation objects include verb, parameters of verb, or other components, such as time, place, determiner, etc. Negation types can be classified as: monomial negation, multinomial negation; simple negation, corrective negation; single negation, compound negation, etc. The negation type of plural thing is related to the negation of the attribute of the number. In particular, some objects in a sentence are singular in grammar but plural in semantic meaning, the exact differentiation should be made in this case. The function of the reversible transformation between 2-dimensional negation and declarative sentence and the role of the function in natural language processing were discussed.