An Analysis of Negation in Natural Language Understanding Corpora
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08929v1
- Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 20:31:53 GMT
- Title: An Analysis of Negation in Natural Language Understanding Corpora
- Authors: Md Mosharaf Hossain, Dhivya Chinnappa, and Eduardo Blanco
- Abstract summary: We show that popular corpora have few negations compared to general-purpose English.
Experiments show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with these corpora obtain substantially worse results with instances that contain negation.
- Score: 10.692655009160742
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: This paper analyzes negation in eight popular corpora spanning six natural
language understanding tasks. We show that these corpora have few negations
compared to general-purpose English, and that the few negations in them are
often unimportant. Indeed, one can often ignore negations and still make the
right predictions. Additionally, experimental results show that
state-of-the-art transformers trained with these corpora obtain substantially
worse results with instances that contain negation, especially if the negations
are important. We conclude that new corpora accounting for negation are needed
to solve natural language understanding tasks when negation is present.
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