Tiffany Kao


2022

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A Question-Answer Driven Approach to Reveal Affirmative Interpretations from Verbal Negations
Md Mosharaf Hossain | Luke Holman | Anusha Kakileti | Tiffany Kao | Nathan Brito | Aaron Mathews | Eduardo Blanco
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

This paper explores a question-answer driven approach to reveal affirmative interpretations from verbal negations (i.e., when a negation cue grammatically modifies a verb). We create a new corpus consisting of 4,472 verbal negations and discover that 67.1% of them convey that an event actually occurred. Annotators generate and answer 7,277 questions % converted for 4,000 for the 3,001 negations that convey an affirmative interpretation. We first cast the problem of revealing affirmative interpretations from negations as a natural language inference (NLI) classification task. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with existing NLI corpora are insufficient to reveal affirmative interpretations. We also observe, however, that fine-tuning brings substantial improvements. In addition to NLI classification, we also explore the more realistic task of generating affirmative interpretations directly from negations with the T5 transformer. We conclude that the generation task remains a challenge as T5 substantially underperforms humans.

2020

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An Analysis of Natural Language Inference Benchmarks through the Lens of Negation
Md Mosharaf Hossain | Venelin Kovatchev | Pranoy Dutta | Tiffany Kao | Elizabeth Wei | Eduardo Blanco
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Negation is underrepresented in existing natural language inference benchmarks. Additionally, one can often ignore the few negations in existing benchmarks and still make the right inference judgments. In this paper, we present a new benchmark for natural language inference in which negation plays a critical role. We also show that state-of-the-art transformers struggle making inference judgments with the new pairs.