I’m Not Mad”: Commonsense Implications of Negation and Contradiction

Liwei Jiang, Antoine Bosselut, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi


Abstract
Natural language inference requires reasoning about contradictions, negations, and their commonsense implications. Given a simple premise (e.g., “I’m mad at you”), humans can reason about the varying shades of contradictory statements ranging from straightforward negations (“I’m not mad at you”) to commonsense contradictions (“I’m happy”). Moreover, these negated or contradictory statements shift the commonsense implications of the original premise in interesting and nontrivial ways. For example, while “I’m mad” implies “I’m unhappy about something,” negating the premise does not necessarily negate the corresponding commonsense implications. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study focusing on commonsense implications of negated statements and contradictions. We introduce ANION, a new commonsense knowledge graph with 624K if-then rules focusing on negated and contradictory events. We then present joint generative and discriminative inference models for this new resource, providing novel empirical insights on how logical negations and commonsense contradictions reshape the commonsense implications of their original premises.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.346
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4380–4397
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.346
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.346
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liwei Jiang, Antoine Bosselut, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi. 2021. “I’m Not Mad”: Commonsense Implications of Negation and Contradiction. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4380–4397, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“I’m Not Mad”: Commonsense Implications of Negation and Contradiction (Jiang et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.346.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.346.mp4
Data
ATOMICConceptNet