{"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/timedial-temporal-commonsense-reasoning-in","title":"TIMEDIAL: Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in Dialog","arxiv_id":"2106.04571","date":"2021-06-08","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Lianhui Qin","Aditya Gupta","Shyam Upadhyay","Luheng He","Yejin Choi","Manaal Faruqui"],"abstract":"Everyday conversations require understanding everyday events, which in turn, requires understanding temporal commonsense concepts interwoven with those events. Despite recent progress with massive pre-trained language models (LMs) such as T5 and GPT-3, their capability of temporal reasoning in dialogs remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we present the first study to investigate pre-trained LMs for their temporal reasoning capabilities in dialogs by introducing a new task and a crowd-sourced English challenge set, TIMEDIAL. We formulate TIME-DIAL as a multiple-choice cloze task with over 1.1K carefully curated dialogs. Empirical results demonstrate that even the best performing models struggle on this task compared to humans, with 23 absolute points of gap in accuracy. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the models fail to reason about dialog context correctly; instead, they rely on shallow cues based on existing temporal patterns in context, motivating future research for modeling temporal concepts in text and robust contextual reasoning about them. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/timedial.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04571v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.04571v1.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":"timedial-temporal-commonsense-reasoning-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research-datasets/timedial","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multiple-choice","task_name":"Multiple-choice"},{"task_slug":"timedial","task_name":"Timedial"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adafactor","method_name":"Adafactor"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-3","method_name":"GPT-3"},{"method_slug":"glu","method_name":"Gated Linear Unit"},{"method_slug":"inverse-square-root-schedule","method_name":"Inverse Square Root Schedule"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sentencepiece","method_name":"SentencePiece"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"t5","method_name":"T5"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"timedial","name":"TimeDial","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.04571","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}