# Commonsense Knowledge with Negation: A Resource to Enhance Negation Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19921 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19921/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [Understanding by Understanding Not: Modeling Negation in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03519/) (2021)
- [CONDAQA: A Contrastive Reading Comprehension Dataset for Reasoning about Negation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00295/) (2022)
- [NevIR: Negation in Neural Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07614/) (2023)
- ["I'm Not Mad": Commonsense Implications of Negation and Contradiction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06511/) (2021)
- [Beyond Distributional Hypothesis: Let Language Models Learn Meaning-Text Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03815/) (2022)
- [UnCommonSense: Informative Negative Knowledge about Everyday Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09292/) (2022)
- [Paraphrasing in Affirmative Terms Improves Negation Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07492/) (2024)
- [PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07988/) (2022)
- [Making Language Models Robust Against Negation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07717/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.
