SemEval-2020 Task 5: Counterfactual Recognition
This work provides a benchmark for natural language processing in counterfactual thinking, which is incremental as it establishes a new shared task without proposing novel methods.
The paper introduced a counterfactual recognition task as part of SemEval-2020, focusing on identifying counterfactual statements and extracting their antecedents and consequents, with 27 and 11 submissions received for the two subtasks respectively.
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.