By Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles Ortiz
A Winograd schema is a pair of sentences that differ in only one or two words and that contain an ambiguity that is resolved in opposite ways in the two sentences and requires the use of world knowledge and reasoning for its resolution. The schema takes its name from a well-known example by Terry Winograd
The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence.If the word is ``feared'', then ``they'' presumably refers to the city council; if it is ``advocated'' then ``they'' presumably refers to the demonstrators.
In his paper, ``The Winograd Schema Challenge'' Hector Levesque (2011) proposes to assemble a set of such Winograd schemas that are
The set would then be presented as a challenge for AI programs, along the lines of the Turing test. The strengths of the challenge are that it is clear-cut, in that the answer to each schema is a binary choice; vivid, in that it is obvious to non-experts that a program that fails to get the right answers clearly has serious gaps in its understanding; and difficult, in that it is far beyond the current state of the art.
A contest, entitled the Winograd Schema Challenge was run once, in 2016. At that time, there was a cash prize offered for achieving human-level performance in the contest. Since then, the sponsor has withdrawn; therefore NO CASH PRIZES CAN BE OFFERED OR WILL BE AWARDED FOR ANY KIND OF PERFORMANCE OR ACHIEVEMENT ON THIS CHALLENGE.
Both versions of the collections are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
For comparison, there is also a small collection of examples that, though interesting, in one way or another fail to meet the bar of WS schemas. To avoid confusion, these are placed on a separate page.
Translation of 12 WSs into Chinese (translated by Wei Xu).
Translations into Japanese, by
Soichiro Tanaka, Rafal Rzepka, and Shiho Katajima
Translation changing English names to Japanese
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Translation preserving English names
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There is also a Japanese version of the WSC, with a training set of size 1322 and a test set of size 564. Paper (in Japanese). Github.
Translation into French, by Pascal Amsili and Olga Seminck
Winograd Schemas in Portuguese by Gabriela Melo, Vinicius Imaizumi, and Fábio Cozman.
Mandarinograd: A Chinese Collection of Winograd Schemas by Timothée Bernard and Ting Han, LREC-2020.
Translation into Hebrew, by Vered Shwartz. HTML JSON .
Translation into Hungarian by Noémi Vadász and Noémi Ligeti-Nagy.
Translation into Russian by Tatiana Shavrina et al.
Translation into Thai by Phakphum Artkaew, Chanikarn Inthongpan, and Korakoch Rienmek.
David Bender, Establishing a Human Baseline for the Winograd Schema Challenge. MAICS 2015
Ernest Davis, Winograd Schemas and Machine Translation, arXiv:1608.01884, August 2016.
Hector Levesque, The Winograd Schema Challenge, Commonsense-2011.
Hector Levesque, Ernest Davis, and Leora Morgenstern, The Winograd Schema Challenge, KR-2012. An expanded version of the previous item.
Hector Levesque, On Our Best Behaviour, IJCAI Research Excellence Award Presentation, 2013.
Leora Morgenstern, E. Davis, and Charles Ortiz, Planning, Executing, and Evaluating the Winograd Schema Challenge, AI Magazine Spring 2016. Article in the magazine