A sequential pattern with negation, or negative sequential pattern, takes the form of a sequential pattern for which the negation symbol may be used in front of some of the pattern's itemsets. Intuitively, such a pattern occurs in a sequence if negated itemsets are absent in the sequence. Recent work has shown that different semantics can be attributed to these pattern forms, and that state-of-the-art algorithms do not extract the same sets of patterns. This raises the important question of the interpretability of sequential pattern with negation. In this study, our focus is on exploring how potential users perceive negation in sequential patterns. Our aim is to determine whether specific semantics are more "intuitive" than others and whether these align with the semantics employed by one or more state-of-the-art algorithms. To achieve this, we designed a questionnaire to reveal the semantics' intuition of each user. This article presents both the design of the questionnaire and an in-depth analysis of the 124 responses obtained. The outcomes indicate that two of the semantics are predominantly intuitive; however, neither of them aligns with the semantics of the primary state-of-the-art algorithms. As a result, we provide recommendations to account for this disparity in the conclusions drawn.

翻译：带否定的序列模式，或称负序列模式，是一种序列模式形式，其中否定符号可用于某些模式的项集之前。直观上，如果一个序列中不存在被否定的项集，则该模式出现在该序列中。近期研究表明，这些模式形式可赋予不同的语义，且现有最优算法提取的模式集并不相同。这引发了一个关键问题：带否定的序列模式的可解释性如何。本研究聚焦于探索潜在用户如何理解序列模式中的否定。我们的目标是确定特定语义是否比其他语义更"直观"，以及这些语义是否与一种或多种现有最优算法采用的语义一致。为此，我们设计了一份问卷以揭示每位用户的语义直觉。本文既介绍了问卷设计，又对收集的124份回答进行了深入分析。结果表明，其中两种语义占主导直觉地位；然而，这两种语义均未与主要现有最优算法的语义一致。因此，我们针对结论中存在的这一差异提出了相应建议。