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Anti-negation method for handling negation words in question answering system

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Abstract

The question answer (QA) system for a reading comprehension task tries to answer the question by retrieving the needed phrase from the given content. Precise answering is the key role of a QA system. An ambiguity is developed when we need to answer a negative question with a positive reply. The negation words change the polarity of the sentence, and hence, the scope of negation words is notable. This has paved the way for studying the role of ‘negation’ in the natural language processing (NLP) task. The handling of these words is considered a major part of our proposed methodology. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to retrieve and replace the negation words present in the content and query. A comparative study is done for performing word embedding over these words using various state-of-the-art methods. In earlier works when handling the negation the semantics of the sentences are changed. Hence, in this paper we try to maintain the semantics through our proposed methodology. The updated content is embedded into the bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and thus makes the retrieving of an answer for a question answer system easier. The proposed work has been carried over the Stanford Negation, and the SQuAD dataset with a higher precision value of 96.2% has been achieved in retrieving the answers that are given in the dataset.

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  1. Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India

    J. Felicia Lilian, K. Sundarakantham & S. Mercy Shalinie

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  1. J. Felicia Lilian
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Lilian, J.F., Sundarakantham, K. & Shalinie, S.M. Anti-negation method for handling negation words in question answering system. J Supercomput 77, 4244–4266 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03437-1

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