Papers › NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms

NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms

26 May 2023arXiv:2305.17008archive 2025-07-28

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

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.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2305.17008")

Code

Syntology Ran 1 of 4 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 3 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · violated contract.

By repository: official repository: 4 samples from 1 repository, 1 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

salt-nlp/normbank officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubCC-BY-SA-4.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

4 samples harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · violated contract
3unverified

Licence: 4 of the 4 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from salt-nlp/normbank. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: 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. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

grammatical salt-nlp/normbank/src/merge_behaviors.py official repository ran · violated contract fingerprinted CC-BY-SA-4.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · ad90802e783f35ff · report
get_items salt-nlp/normbank/src/pull_items_GPT.py official repository unverified CC-BY-SA-4.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · f54f127803376872 · report
get_prep_det salt-nlp/normbank/src/pull_roles_GPT.py official repository unverified CC-BY-SA-4.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · cf65bedc7f8a8695 · report
get_roles salt-nlp/normbank/src/pull_roles_GPT.py official repository unverified CC-BY-SA-4.0 (copyleft) · pointer only · 4655497d950b43c9 · report

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections