Farzana Rashid

Zijie Wang, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Farzana Rashid et al.

Negation is a common and important semantic feature in natural language, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle when negation is involved in natural language understanding tasks. Commonsense knowledge, on the other hand, despite being a well-studied topic, lacks investigations involving negation. In this work, we show that commonsense knowledge with negation is challenging for models to understand. We present a novel approach to automatically augment existing commonsense knowledge corpora with negation, yielding two new corpora containing over 2M triples with if-then relations. In addition, pre-training LLMs on our corpora benefits negation understanding.

Zijie Wang, Farzana Rashid, Eduardo Blanco

People often answer yes-no questions without explicitly saying yes, no, or similar polar keywords. Figuring out the meaning of indirect answers is challenging, even for large language models. In this paper, we investigate this problem working with dialogues from multiple domains. We present new benchmarks in three diverse domains: movie scripts, tennis interviews, and airline customer service. We present an approach grounded on distant supervision and blended training to quickly adapt to a new dialogue domain. Experimental results show that our approach is never detrimental and yields F1 improvements as high as 11-34%.