Understanding by Understanding Not: Modeling Negation in Language Models

05/07/2021

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by   Arian Hosseini, et al.

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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 the negated NLI benchmarks.