Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning

Lifu Huang, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi


Abstract
Understanding narratives requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires interpreting the likely causes and effects of events, even when they are not mentioned explicitly. In this paper, we introduce Cosmos QA, a large-scale dataset of 35,600 problems that require commonsense-based reading comprehension, formulated as multiple-choice questions. In stark contrast to most existing reading comprehension datasets where the questions focus on factual and literal understanding of the context paragraph, our dataset focuses on reading between the lines over a diverse collection of people’s everyday narratives, asking such questions as “what might be the possible reason of ...?", or “what would have happened if ..." that require reasoning beyond the exact text spans in the context. To establish baseline performances on Cosmos QA, we experiment with several state-of-the-art neural architectures for reading comprehension, and also propose a new architecture that improves over the competitive baselines. Experimental results demonstrate a significant gap between machine (68.4%) and human performance (94%), pointing to avenues for future research on commonsense machine comprehension. Dataset, code and leaderboard is publicly available at https://wilburone.github.io/cosmos.
Anthology ID:
D19-1243
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2391–2401
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1243
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1243
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lifu Huang, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi. 2019. Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2391–2401, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning (Huang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1243.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1243.Attachment.pdf
Data
CosmosQAMCScriptNarrativeQARACEReCoRDSQuADSWAG