Papers › SemEval-2020 Task 5: Counterfactual Recognition

SemEval-2020 Task 5: Counterfactual Recognition

2 Aug 2020SEMEVAL 2020arXiv:2008.00563archive 2025-07-28

Xiaoyu Yang, Stephen Obadinma, Huasha Zhao, Qiong Zhang, Stan Matwin, Xiaodan Zhu

We present a counterfactual recognition (CR) task, the shared Task 5 of SemEval-2020. Counterfactuals describe potential outcomes (consequents) produced by actions or circumstances that did not happen or cannot happen and are counter to the facts (antecedent). Counterfactual thinking is an important characteristic of the human cognitive system; it connects antecedents and consequents with causal relations. Our task provides a benchmark for counterfactual recognition in natural language with two subtasks. Subtask-1 aims to determine whether a given sentence is a counterfactual statement or not. Subtask-2 requires the participating systems to extract the antecedent and consequent in a given counterfactual statement. During the SemEval-2020 official evaluation period, we received 27 submissions to Subtask-1 and 11 to Subtask-2. The data, baseline code, and leaderboard can be found at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/21691. The data and baseline code are also available at https://zenodo.org/record/3932442.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

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

Code

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

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Counterfactual DetectionCounterfactual InferenceSentence

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Counterfactuals

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