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Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation
Author(s) -
Capuano Francesca,
Dudschig Carolin,
Günther Fritz,
Kaup Barbara
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.13015
Subject(s) - negation , noun , set (abstract data type) , context (archaeology) , natural language processing , linguistics , similarity (geometry) , semantics (computer science) , complement (music) , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , paleontology , biochemistry , chemistry , complementation , gene , phenotype , image (mathematics) , biology , programming language
Abstract Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun‐alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.