MCScript: A Novel Dataset for Assessing Machine Comprehension Using Script Knowledge

TL;DR

MCScript is a large, crowdsourced dataset of narrative texts and questions designed to evaluate machine comprehension that necessitates reasoning with commonsense and script knowledge about everyday activities.

Contribution

This paper introduces MCScript, a novel dataset focusing on everyday stories and questions requiring script-based commonsense reasoning, and organizes a shared task to advance natural language understanding.

Findings

Dataset contains numerous inference questions requiring script knowledge.

Crowdsourcing effectively generates challenging comprehension questions.

Provides a benchmark for evaluating commonsense reasoning in NLP.

Abstract

We introduce a large dataset of narrative texts and questions about these texts, intended to be used in a machine comprehension task that requires reasoning using commonsense knowledge. Our dataset complements similar datasets in that we focus on stories about everyday activities, such as going to the movies or working in the garden, and that the questions require commonsense knowledge, or more specifically, script knowledge, to be answered. We show that our mode of data collection via crowdsourcing results in a substantial amount of such inference questions. The dataset forms the basis of a shared task on commonsense and script knowledge organized at SemEval 2018 and provides challenging test cases for the broader natural language understanding community.