Winograd Schema Task

A Winograd Schema Task is a linguistic intelligence test that requires a binary classification given one linguistic sentence and one binary reference disambiguity question.

• Context:
  • It can (typically) require the use of World Knowledge.
  • It can (typically) require Deductive Reasoning.
• Example(s):
  • input: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence. Who [feared/advocated] violence?"
    output: The city councilmen / the demonstrators.
  • input: "The trophy doesn't fit into the brown suitcase because it's too [small/large]. What is too [small/large]?"
    output: The suitcase / the trophy.
  • a Nuance Communication Winograd Schema Challenge.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Entailment Decision Task.
  • a Turing Test.
• See: IQ Test, Complex Linguistic Expression.

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References

2013

• http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/WS.html
  • A Winograd schema is a pair of sentences that differ in only one or two words and that contain an ambiguity that is resolved in opposite ways in the two sentences and requires the use of world knowledge and reasoning for its resolution. The schema takes its name from a well-known example by Terry Winograd (1972):

    The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence.

    If the word is “feared, then “they presumably refers to the city council; if it is “advocated then “they presumably refers to the demonstrators.

2011

• (Levesque, 2011) ⇒ Hector J. Levesque. (2011). “The Winograd Schema Challenge.” In: AAAI Spring Symposium: Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning.

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