mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

RiddleSense: Reasoning about Riddle Questions Featuring Linguistic Creativity and Commonsense Knowledge

arXiv 2101.00376 ↗First posted 2 Jan 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 61

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 24 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of figurative language, and counterfactual reasoning skills, which are all important abilities for advanced natural language understanding (NLU). However, there are currently no dedicated datasets aiming to test these abilities. Herein, we present RiddleSense, a new multiple-choice question answering task, which comes with the first large dataset (5.7k examples) for answering riddle-style commonsense questions. We systematically evaluate a wide range of models over the challenge, and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance -- suggesting intriguing future research in the direction of higher-order commonsense reasoning and linguistic creativity towards building advanced NLU systems.

Key facts. Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2021.

Builds on

30 of 47 references.

References · 30

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  5. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  6. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
  7. 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,100
  8. 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,883
  9. 2019ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representationscited by 2,790
  10. 2017A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inferencecited by 2,682
  11. 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,164
  12. 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
18 more
  1. 2016ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledgecited by 1,067
  2. 2020UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA Systemcited by 476
  3. 2018SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inferencecited by 333
  4. 2019Abductive Commonsense Reasoningcited by 301
  5. 2019KagNet: Knowledge-Aware Graph Networks for Commonsense Reasoningcited by 216
  6. 2020Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question Answeringcited by 122
  7. 2020Birds have four legs?! NumerSense: Probing Numerical Commonsense Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 110
  8. 2019Graph-Based Reasoning over Heterogeneous External Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 68
  9. 2019Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laughcited by 46
  10. 2020ProtoQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Prototypical Common-Sense Reasoningcited by 46
  11. 2020Connecting the Dots: A Knowledgeable Path Generator for Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 44
  12. 2019Pun Generation with Surprisecited by 37
  13. 2018Neural Metaphor Detection in Contextcited by 34
  14. 2020R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledgecited by 32
  15. 2020Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoningcited by 29
  16. 2019How Large Are Lions? Inducing Distributions over Quantitative Attributescited by 26
  17. 2019Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generationcited by 18
  18. 2020Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoningcited by 18

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 8; 2023: 10; 2024: 17; 2025: 15; 2026: 8.

61 papers.

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  1. 2024Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Surveycited by 324
  2. 2022Leveraging Large Language Models for Multiple Choice Question Answeringcited by 203
  3. 2022Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretrainingcited by 156
  4. 2024Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoningcited by 86
  5. 2022Testing the Ability of Language Models to Interpret Figurative Languagecited by 67
  6. 2023Graph Neural Prompting with Large Language Modelscited by 64
  7. 2024Beyond Answers: Transferring Reasoning Capabilities to Smaller LLMs Using Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillationcited by 47
  8. 2024Puzzle Solving using Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 45
  9. 2022Rainier: Reinforced Knowledge Introspector for Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 43
  10. 2025Cognitive Kernel-Pro: A Framework for Deep Research Agents and Agent Foundation Models Trainingcited by 42
  11. 2021Human Parity on CommonsenseQA: Augmenting Self-Attention with External Attentioncited by 40
  12. 2023Benchmarks for Automated Commonsense Reasoning: A Surveycited by 40
38 more
  1. 2022Commonsense Knowledge Reasoning and Generation with Pre-trained Language Models: A Surveycited by 38
  2. 2024Confidence Under the Hood: An Investigation into the Confidence-Probability Alignment in Large Language Modelscited by 34
  3. 2023Making Large Language Models Better Data Creatorscited by 28
  4. 2023Eliminating Reasoning via Inferring with Planning: A New Framework to Guide LLMs' Non-linear Thinkingcited by 19
  5. 2023BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Modelscited by 18
  6. 2025Graph-based Approaches and Functionalities in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 18
  7. 2024Optimizing Language Model's Reasoning Abilities with Weak Supervisioncited by 15
  8. 2021Probing Commonsense Explanation in Dialogue Response Generationcited by 13
  9. 2024Question-guided Knowledge Graph Re-scoring and Injection for Knowledge Graph Question Answeringcited by 13
  10. 2025VisualSphinx: Large-Scale Synthetic Vision Logic Puzzles for RLcited by 12
  11. 2021BiRdQA: A Bilingual Dataset for Question Answering on Tricky Riddlescited by 10
  12. 2022Leveraging Visual Knowledge in Language Tasks: An Empirical Study on Intermediate Pre-training for Cross-modal Knowledge Transfercited by 10
  13. 2025A Causality-aware Paradigm for Evaluating Creativity of Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 10
  14. 2026Exploring Knowledge Purification in Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for LLMscited by 9
  15. 2023NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillationcited by 8
  16. 2024Weak-eval-Strong: Evaluating and Eliciting Lateral Thinking of LLMs with Situation Puzzlescited by 8
  17. 2024Creativity in AI: Progresses and Challengescited by 7
  18. 2022CC-Riddle: A Question Answering Dataset of Chinese Character Riddlescited by 6
  19. 2024SemEval-2024 Task 9: BRAINTEASER: A Novel Task Defying Common Sensecited by 6
  20. 2024DCR: Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning for Multi-choice Question Answering with LLMscited by 5
  21. 2025A Comprehensive Graph Framework for Question Answering with Mode-Seeking Preference Alignmentcited by 5
  22. 2025PuzzlePlex: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Reasoning and Planning with Puzzlescited by 5
  23. 2023Vision Enhancing LLMs: Empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMscited by 4
  24. 2022CoSe-Co: Text Conditioned Generative CommonSense Contextualizercited by 3
  25. 2023SituatedGen: Incorporating Geographical and Temporal Contexts into Generative Commonsense Reasoningcited by 3
  26. 2024PARADISE: Evaluating Implicit Planning Skills of Language Models with Procedural Warnings and Tips Datasetcited by 3
  27. 2024RISCORE: Enhancing In-Context Riddle Solving in Language Models through Context-Reconstructed Example Augmentationcited by 3
  28. 2025Puzzled by Puzzles: When Vision-Language Models Can't Take a Hintcited by 3
  29. 2023CommonsenseVIS: Visualizing and Understanding Commonsense Reasoning Capabilities of Natural Language Modelscited by 2
  30. 2023Does the "most sinfully decadent cake ever" taste good? Answering Yes/No Questions from Figurative Contextscited by 2
  31. 2025Option-ID Based Elimination For Multiple Choice Questionscited by 2
  32. 2025Leave It to the Experts: Detecting Knowledge Distillation via MoE Expert Signaturescited by 2
  33. 2025The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddlescited by 2
  34. 2024SemPool: Simple, robust, and interpretable KG pooling for enhancing language modelscited by 1
  35. 2024AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Cracking Brain Teasers: Transformer Models for Lateral Thinking Puzzlescited by 1
  36. 2025Question-Aware Knowledge Graph Prompting for Enhancing Large Language Modelscited by 1
  37. 2025Reasoning Riddles: How Explainability Reveals Cognitive Limits in Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
  38. 2026BrainBench: Exposing the Commonsense Reasoning Gap in Large Language Modelscited by 1

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