Negation in Cognitive Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to identify and replace negated events or properties with their inverses, enhancing cognitive reasoning systems that combine logic and machine learning for question answering.

Contribution

It introduces an effective procedure for determining negated elements in sentences, improving the handling of negation in cognitive reasoning models.

Findings

The procedure successfully identifies negated events or properties.

It improves the performance of question answering in cognitive reasoning systems.

Benchmark evaluations demonstrate practical usefulness.

Abstract

Negation is both an operation in formal logic and in natural language by which a proposition is replaced by one stating the opposite, as by the addition of "not" or another negation cue. Treating negation in an adequate way is required for cognitive reasoning, which aims at modeling the human ability to draw meaningful conclusions despite incomplete and inconsistent knowledge. One task of cognitive reasoning is answering questions given by sentences in natural language. There are tools based on discourse representation theory to convert sentences automatically into a formal logic representation, and additional knowledge can be added using the predicate names in the formula and knowledge databases. However, the knowledge in logic databases in practice always is incomplete. Hence, forward reasoning of automated reasoning systems alone does not suffice to derive answers to questions because, instead of complete proofs, often only partial positive knowledge can be derived, while negative knowledge is used only during the reasoning process. In consequence, we aim at eliminating syntactic negation, strictly speaking, the negated event or property. In this paper, we describe an effective procedure to determine the negated event or property in order to replace it by its inverse. This lays the basis of cognitive reasoning, employing both logic and machine learning for general question answering. We evaluate our procedure by several benchmarks and demonstrate its practical usefulness in our cognitive reasoning system.