NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms

Caleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, Diyi Yang


Abstract
We present NormBank, a knowledge bank of 155k situational norms. This resource is designed to ground flexible normative reasoning for interactive, assistive, and collaborative AI systems. Unlike prior commonsense resources, NormBank grounds each inference within a multivalent sociocultural frame, which includes the setting (e.g., restaurant), the agents’ contingent roles (waiter, customer), their attributes (age, gender), and other physical, social, and cultural constraints (e.g., the temperature or the country of operation). In total, NormBank contains 63k unique constraints from a taxonomy that we introduce and iteratively refine here. Constraints then apply in different combinations to frame social norms. Under these manipulations, norms are non-monotonic — one can cancel an inference by updating its frame even slightly. Still, we find evidence that neural models can help reliably extend the scope and coverage of NormBank. We further demonstrate the utility of this resource with a series of transfer experiments. For data and code, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/normbank
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.429
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7756–7776
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.429
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.429
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Caleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, and Diyi Yang. 2023. NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7756–7776, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms (Ziems et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.429.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.429.mp4