Do Language Models Have Common Sense?

Trieu H. Trinh, Quoc V. Le

Abstract: It has been argued that current machine learning models do not have commonsense, and therefore must be hard-coded with prior knowledge (Marcus, 2018). Here we show surprising evidence that language models can already learn to capture certain common sense knowledge. Our key observation is that a language model can compute the probability of any statement, and this probability can be used to evaluate the truthfulness of that statement. On the Winograd Schema Challenge (Levesque et al., 2011), language models are 11% higher in accuracy than previous state-of-the-art supervised methods. Language models can also be fine-tuned for the task of Mining Commonsense Knowledge on ConceptNet to achieve an F1 score of 0.912 and 0.824, outperforming previous best results (Jastrzebskiet al., 2018). Further analysis demonstrates that language models can discover unique features of Winograd Schema contexts that decide the correct answers without explicit supervision.

TL;DR: We present evidence that LMs do capture common sense with state-of-the-art results on both Winograd Schema Challenge and Commonsense Knowledge Mining.

Data: [SQuAD](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/squad), [WSC](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/wsc)