We present a counterfactual recognition (CR) task, the shared Task 5 of SemEval-2020. Counterfactuals describe potential outcomes (consequents) produced by actions or circumstances that did not happen or cannot happen and are counter to the facts (antecedent). Counterfactual thinking is an important characteristic of the human cognitive system; it connects antecedents and consequents with causal relations. Our task provides a benchmark for counterfactual recognition in natural language with two subtasks. Subtask-1 aims to determine whether a given sentence is a counterfactual statement or not. Subtask-2 requires the participating systems to extract the antecedent and consequent in a given counterfactual statement. During the SemEval-2020 official evaluation period, we received 27 submissions to Subtask-1 and 11 to Subtask-2. The data, baseline code, and leaderboard can be found at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/21691. The data and baseline code are also available at https://zenodo.org/record/3932442.
@article{arxiv.2008.00563,
title = {SemEval-2020 Task 5: Counterfactual Recognition},
author = {Xiaoyu Yang and Stephen Obadinma and Huasha Zhao and Qiong Zhang and Stan Matwin and Xiaodan Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.00563},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Task description paper of SemEval-2020 Task 5: Modelling Causal Reasoning in Language: Detecting Counterfactuals