# "Not not bad" is not "bad": A distributional account of negation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.2158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.2158/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Conversational Negation using Worldly Context in Compositional Distributional Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05748/) (2021)
- [Negation, Coordination, and Quantifiers in Contextualized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07836/) (2022)
- [Negation: A Pink Elephant in the Large Language Models' Room?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22395/) (2025)
- [A Visual Tour Of Current Challenges In Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12565/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the increasing empirical success of distributional models of compositional semantics, it is timely to consider the types of textual logic that such models are capable of capturing. In this paper, we address shortcomings in the ability of current models to capture logical operations such as negation. As a solution we propose a tripartite formulation for a continuous vector space representation of semantics and subsequently use this representation to develop a formal compositional notion of negation within such models.