Commonsense Knowledge with Negation: A Resource to Enhance Negation Understanding

Zijie Wang, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Farzana Rashid, Eduardo Blanco


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.578
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11915–11934
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.578/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zijie Wang, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Farzana Rashid, and Eduardo Blanco. 2026. Commonsense Knowledge with Negation: A Resource to Enhance Negation Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 11915–11934, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Commonsense Knowledge with Negation: A Resource to Enhance Negation Understanding (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.578.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-acl.578.checklist.pdf