NOPE: A Corpus of Naturally-Occurring Presuppositions in English
This work addresses the challenge of natural language understanding for AI systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research with a new dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding presuppositions in language by introducing the NOPE Corpus to investigate context-sensitivity of triggers and evaluate machine learning models, finding that transformer-based models succeed in simple cases but fail in complex ones.
Understanding language requires grasping not only the overtly stated content, but also making inferences about things that were left unsaid. These inferences include presuppositions, a phenomenon by which a listener learns about new information through reasoning about what a speaker takes as given. Presuppositions require complex understanding of the lexical and syntactic properties that trigger them as well as the broader conversational context. In this work, we introduce the Naturally-Occurring Presuppositions in English (NOPE) Corpus to investigate the context-sensitivity of 10 different types of presupposition triggers and to evaluate machine learning models' ability to predict human inferences. We find that most of the triggers we investigate exhibit moderate variability. We further find that transformer-based models draw correct inferences in simple cases involving presuppositions, but they fail to capture the minority of exceptional cases in which human judgments reveal complex interactions between context and triggers.