TY - JOUR AU - AB - Understanding time is crucial for understand- ing events expressed in natural language. Be- cause people rarely say the obvious, it is of- ten necessary to have commonsense knowl- edge about various temporal aspects of events, such as duration, frequency, and temporal or- der. However, this important problem has so far received limited attention. This pa- per systematically studies this temporal com- monsense problem. Specifically, we define five classes of temporal commonsense, and use crowdsourcing to develop a new dataset, M CTACO , that serves as a test set for this task. We find that the best current methods used on MCTACO are still far behind human performance, by about 20%, and discuss sev- eral directions for improvement. We hope that the new dataset and our study here can foster more future research on this topic. 1 Introduction Figure 1: Five types of temporal commonsense in MCTACO. Natural language understanding requires the abil- Note that a question may have multiple correct answers. ity to reason with commonsense knowledge (Schu- Temporal commonsense has received limited at- bert, 2002; Davis, 2014), and the last few years tention so far. Our first contribution is that, have seen significant amount of work in this TI - “Going on a vacation” takes longer than “Going for a walk”: A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding JF - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) DO - 10.18653/v1/d19-1332 DA - 2019-01-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/unpaywall/going-on-a-vacation-takes-longer-than-going-for-a-walk-a-study-of-X1oKrCNkl9 DP - DeepDyve ER -