Negation in a Language

Abstract

Negation is a common feature in all languages verbal as well as in text. It is used when it is needed to express something that is not true or false and disagree or denied some statement. To express a negative statement, in most cases, a dedicated negative term or phrase is used. The negation in the sentence is used in various ways, most commonly using a negative using some specially designated words such as no, not, never, none, and nobody in English. On the other hand, sometimes use prefixes (e.g., de-, dis-, un-) or suffixes (-less). For example, dislike, uselessness, etc. This paper only focuses on negation in the Bengali language. For Bengali, there are much more complex features like double negation, reduplicated negation, etc. Apart from these so many exceptional uses of negation are there. The Bengali negation is the most frequent word in the Bengali language. There are few works found in Bengali negation and most of these are in linguistic aspect. This work is dedicated to a corpus-based study of Bengali negation that explores their frequencies at word level as well as sentence level and also explores various unexplored features from the computational point of view. The outcome of this study is very much helpful in various Natural Language Applications (NLP), like text summarization, machine translation, hate speech detection, etc.