mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences

arXiv 2012.15738 ↗First posted 31 Dec 2020cs.CL cs.AIcited by 133

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Abstract (arXiv)

In social settings, much of human behavior is governed by unspoken rules of conduct. For artificial systems to be fully integrated into social environments, adherence to such norms is a central prerequisite. We investigate whether contemporary NLG models can function as behavioral priors for systems deployed in social settings by generating action hypotheses that achieve predefined goals under moral constraints. Moreover, we examine if models can anticipate likely consequences of (im)moral actions, or explain why certain actions are preferable by generating relevant norms. For this purpose, we introduce 'Moral Stories', a crowd-sourced dataset of structured, branching narratives for the study of grounded, goal-oriented social reasoning. Finally, we propose decoding strategies that effectively combine multiple expert models to significantly improve the quality of generated actions, consequences, and norms compared to strong baselines, e.g. though abductive reasoning.

Key facts. Cited by 133 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 4; 2022: 19; 2023: 30; 2024: 18; 2025: 28; 2026: 34.

133 papers.

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  1. 2023From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Modelscited by 257
  2. 2023Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMscited by 211
  3. 2023REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representationscited by 203
  4. 2023SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Modelscited by 189
  5. 2022Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Valuescited by 147
  6. 2021Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experimentcited by 140
  7. 2022When to Make Exceptions: Exploring Language Models as Accounts of Human Moral Judgmentcited by 93
  8. 2022The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systemscited by 92
  9. 2023Training Socially Aligned Language Models on Simulated Social Interactionscited by 77
  10. 2024SafetyPrompts: a Systematic Review of Open Datasets for Evaluating and Improving Large Language Model Safetycited by 75
  11. 2022Moral Mimicry: Large Language Models Produce Moral Rationalizations Tailored to Political Identitycited by 71
  12. 2023Natural Language Reasoning, A Surveycited by 61
38 more
  1. 2023NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Normscited by 60
  2. 2023Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language modelscited by 51
  3. 2022NormSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Flycited by 48
  4. 2021Ethical-Advice Taker: Do Language Models Understand Natural Language Interventions?cited by 46
  5. 2023From Instructions to Intrinsic Human Values -- A Survey of Alignment Goals for Big Modelscited by 45
  6. 2023MoCa: Measuring Human-Language Model Alignment on Causal and Moral Judgment Taskscited by 44
  7. 2022ClarifyDelphi: Reinforced Clarification Questions with Defeasibility Rewards for Social and Moral Situationscited by 36
  8. 2023Rethinking Machine Ethics -- Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?cited by 36
  9. 2024Operationalizing Contextual Integrity in Privacy-Conscious Assistantscited by 36
  10. 2023Chinese Open Instruction Generalist: A Preliminary Releasecited by 35
  11. 2022Speaking Multiple Languages Affects the Moral Bias of Language Modelscited by 34
  12. 2022Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narrativescited by 32
  13. 2022Does Moral Code Have a Moral Code? Probing Delphi's Moral Philosophycited by 31
  14. 2024AI-LieDar: Examine the Trade-off Between Utility and Truthfulness in LLM Agentscited by 28
  15. 2023Second Thoughts are Best: Learning to Re-Align With Human Values from Text Editscited by 27
  16. 2023Denevil: Towards Deciphering and Navigating the Ethical Values of Large Language Models via Instruction Learningcited by 26
  17. 2024Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Artcited by 26
  18. 2023KoSBi: A Dataset for Mitigating Social Bias Risks Towards Safer Large Language Model Applicationcited by 24
  19. 2021A Word on Machine Ethics: A Response to Jiang et al. (2021)cited by 23
  20. 2023Probing the Moral Development of Large Language Models through Defining Issues Testcited by 23
  21. 2024CLAVE: An Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Values of LLM Generated Responsescited by 23
  22. 2023Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailmentcited by 22
  23. 2025Multiple LLM Agents Debate for Equitable Cultural Alignmentcited by 20
  24. 2021DREAM: Improving Situational QA by First Elaborating the Situationcited by 18
  25. 2024ChatGPT Rates Natural Language Explanation Quality Like Humans: But on Which Scales?cited by 17
  26. 2025CASE-Bench: Context-Aware SafEty Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 17
  27. 2022A Corpus for Understanding and Generating Moral Storiescited by 16
  28. 2024CIVICS: Building a Dataset for Examining Culturally-Informed Values in Large Language Modelscited by 16
  29. 20251-2-3 Check: Enhancing Contextual Privacy in LLM via Multi-Agent Reasoningcited by 16
  30. 2022Robust Preference Learning for Storytelling via Contrastive Reinforcement Learningcited by 14
  31. 2023Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvementscited by 14
  32. 2025LLMs Can't Handle Peer Pressure: Crumbling under Multi-Agent Social Interactionscited by 14
  33. 2022Enabling Classifiers to Make Judgements Explicitly Aligned with Human Valuescited by 13
  34. 2023SQuARe: A Large-Scale Dataset of Sensitive Questions and Acceptable Responses Created Through Human-Machine Collaborationcited by 13
  35. 2025The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmascited by 13
  36. 2025Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lenscited by 13
  37. 2022Learning to Adapt Domain Shifts of Moral Values via Instance Weightingcited by 11
  38. 2025BASIL: Bayesian Assessment of Sycophancy in LLMscited by 11

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