NLP Academy · Lesson

Handling Negation and Edge Cases

Fix not good and other traps.

The Negation Problem

Counting cues breaks on not good, because good still scores positive. Negation can flip a sentence and fool a naive detector.

Keep a small list of negation words like not, never, and no. When one appears, the cue right after it usually means the opposite.

negators = {"not", "never", "no", "isn't", "wasn't"}