Language models are not naysayers: an analysis of language models on negation benchmarks
Thinh Hung Truong, Timothy Baldwin, Karin Verspoor, Trevor Cohn
Abstract
Negation has been shown to be a major bottleneck for masked language models, such as BERT. However, whether this finding still holds for larger-sized auto-regressive language models (“LLMs”) has not been studied comprehensively. With the ever-increasing volume of research and applications of LLMs, we take a step back to evaluate the ability of current-generation LLMs to handle negation, a fundamental linguistic phenomenon that is central to language understanding. We evaluate different LLMs - including the open-source GPT-neo, GPT-3, and InstructGPT - against a wide range of negation benchmarks. Through systematic experimentation with varying model sizes and prompts, we show that LLMs have several limitations including insensitivity to the presence of negation, an inability to capture the lexical semantics of negation, and a failure to reason under negation.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.starsem-1.10
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Alexis Palmer, Jose Camacho-collados
- Venue:
- *SEM
- SIG:
- SIGLEX
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 101–114
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.starsem-1.10
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.starsem-1.10
- Cite (ACL):
- Thinh Hung Truong, Timothy Baldwin, Karin Verspoor, and Trevor Cohn. 2023. Language models are not naysayers: an analysis of language models on negation benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023), pages 101–114, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Language models are not naysayers: an analysis of language models on negation benchmarks (Truong et al., *SEM 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.starsem-1.10.pdf