{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/counterfactual-story-reasoning-and-generation","title":"Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation","arxiv_id":"1909.04076","date":"2019-09-09","proceeding":"IJCNLP 2019 11","authors":["Lianhui Qin","Antoine Bosselut","Ari Holtzman","Chandra Bhagavatula","Elizabeth Clark","Yejin Choi"],"abstract":"Counterfactual reasoning requires predicting how alternative events, contrary to what actually happened, might have resulted in different outcomes. Despite being considered a necessary component of AI-complete systems, few resources have been developed for evaluating counterfactual reasoning in narratives. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Story Rewriting: given an original story and an intervening counterfactual event, the task is to minimally revise the story to make it compatible with the given counterfactual event. Solving this task will require deep understanding of causal narrative chains and counterfactual invariance, and integration of such story reasoning capabilities into conditional language generation models. We present TimeTravel, a new dataset of 29,849 counterfactual rewritings, each with the original story, a counterfactual event, and human-generated revision of the original story compatible with the counterfactual event. Additionally, we include 80,115 counterfactual \"branches\" without a rewritten storyline to support future work on semi- or un-supervised approaches to counterfactual story rewriting. Finally, we evaluate the counterfactual rewriting capacities of several competitive baselines based on pretrained language models, and assess whether common overlap and model-based automatic metrics for text generation correlate well with human scores for counterfactual rewriting.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04076v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.04076v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"counterfactual-story-reasoning-and-generation","repo_url":"https://github.com/qkaren/Counterfactual-StoryRW","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"counterfactual-reasoning","task_name":"Counterfactual Reasoning"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"timetravel","name":"TimeTravel","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/1909.04076","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.04076","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1909.04076"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/qkaren/Counterfactual-StoryRW","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"320dc467a5162394","entry":"read_lines","repo":"qkaren/Counterfactual-StoryRW","repo_kind":"official","path":"evaluate.py","file_url":"https://github.com/qkaren/Counterfactual-StoryRW/blob/HEAD/evaluate.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"320dc467a5162394"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}