This paper explores a question-answer driven approach to reveal affirmative interpretations from verbal negations (i.e., when a negation cue grammatically modifies a verb). We create a new corpus consisting of 4,472 verbal negations and discover that 67.1% of them convey that an event actually occurred. Annotators generate and answer 7,277 questions for the 3,001 negations that convey an affirmative interpretation. We first cast the problem of revealing affirmative interpretations from negations as a natural language inference (NLI) classification task. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with existing NLI corpora are insufficient to reveal affirmative interpretations. We also observe, however, that fine-tuning brings small improvements. In addition to NLI classification, we also explore the more realistic task of generating affirmative interpretations directly from negations with the T5 transformer. We conclude that the generation task remains a challenge as T5 substantially underperforms humans.

本文探讨了一种新的自然语言推理分类任务的方式来发现实际上发生的事件，具体涉及否定语态下的肯定解释。实验结果表明，目前现有的自然语言推理语料库训练出来的最先进的Transformer并不能很好地揭示这种肯定解释，而T5 Transformer在从否定语态生成肯定解释的任务中表现不如人类。

一种基于问答的方法，揭示口头否定中的肯定诠释