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Understanding by Understanding Not: Modeling Negation in Language Models

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arxiv 2105.03519 v1 pith:2DSPZCDB submitted 2021-05-07 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords languagemodelsnegatednegationobjectivemodelingunderstandingaugment
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Negation is a core construction in natural language. Despite being very successful on many tasks, state-of-the-art pre-trained language models often handle negation incorrectly. To improve language models in this regard, we propose to augment the language modeling objective with an unlikelihood objective that is based on negated generic sentences from a raw text corpus. By training BERT with the resulting combined objective we reduce the mean top~1 error rate to 4% on the negated LAMA dataset. We also see some improvements on the negated NLI benchmarks.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects

    cs.CL 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLM fairness scores shift substantially with positive vs negative framing of the same question, and DeFrame—a three-step self-revision prompt—reduces both average bias and this framing gap.

  2. Thunder-KoNUBench: A Corpus-Aligned Benchmark for Korean Negation Understanding

    cs.CL 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new Korean benchmark shows language models underperform on negated sentences, and fine-tuning on it improves their negation understanding.

  3. Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs frequently pass definition questions yet fail to use the same concepts in classification, generation, and editing tasks, a gap the authors call potemkin understanding.

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