Context Matters: A Pragmatic Study of PLMs’ Negation Understanding

Reto Gubelmann, Siegfried Handschuh


Abstract
In linguistics, there are two main perspectives on negation: a semantic and a pragmatic view. So far, research in NLP on negation has almost exclusively adhered to the semantic view. In this article, we adopt the pragmatic paradigm to conduct a study of negation understanding focusing on transformer-based PLMs. Our results differ from previous, semantics-based studies and therefore help to contribute a more comprehensive – and, given the results, much more optimistic – picture of the PLMs’ negation understanding.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.315
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4602–4621
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.315
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.315
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reto Gubelmann and Siegfried Handschuh. 2022. Context Matters: A Pragmatic Study of PLMs’ Negation Understanding. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4602–4621, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Context Matters: A Pragmatic Study of PLMs’ Negation Understanding (Gubelmann & Handschuh, ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.acl-long.315.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.acl-long.315.mp4
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