NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms
Caleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, Diyi Yang
Abstract
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. For data and code, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/normbank- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.429
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7756–7776
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.429
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Caleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, and Diyi Yang. 2023. NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7756–7776, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms (Ziems et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/2023.acl-long.429.pdf