Composing Conversational Negation

Abstract

Negation in natural language does not follow Boolean logic and is therefore inherently difficult to model. In particular, a broader understanding of what is being negated must be taken into account. In previous work, we proposed a framework for the negation of words that accounts for ‘worldly context’. This paper extends that proposal to now account for the compositional structure inherent in language within the DisCoCirc framework. We compose the negations of single words to capture the negation of sentences. We also describe how to model the negation of words whose meanings evolve in the text.