# COPA-SSE: Semi-structured Explanations for Commonsense Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06777/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02361/) (2019)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [KagNet: Knowledge-Aware Graph Networks for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02151/) (2019)
- [What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02145/) (2021)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [ExplaGraphs: An Explanation Graph Generation Task for Structured Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07644/) (2021)
- [When Choosing Plausible Alternatives, Clever Hans can be Clever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00225/) (2019)
- [Quality Control in Crowdsourcing: A Survey of Quality Attributes, Assessment Techniques and Assurance Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02546/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Tokenization Is More Than Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18376/) (2024)
- [On Evaluating Explanation Utility for Human-AI Decision Making in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03545/) (2024)
- [JourneyBench: A Challenging One-Stop Vision-Language Understanding Benchmark of Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12953/) (2024)
- [Improving the OOD Performance of Closed-Source LLMs on NLI Through Strategic Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20209/) (2025)
- [Gradient Ascent Post-training Enhances Language Model Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07052/) (2023)
- [Text-To-KG Alignment: Comparing Current Methods on Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02871/) (2023)
- [Reward Engineering for Generating Semi-structured Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08347/) (2023)
- [CommonWhy: A Dataset for Evaluating Entity-Based Causal Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12918/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Semi-Structured Explanations for COPA (COPA-SSE), a new crowdsourced dataset of 9,747 semi-structured, English common sense explanations for Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) questions. The explanations are formatted as a set of triple-like common sense statements with ConceptNet relations but freely written concepts. This semi-structured format strikes a balance between the high quality but low coverage of structured data and the lower quality but high coverage of free-form crowdsourcing. Each explanation also includes a set of human-given quality ratings. With their familiar format, the explanations are geared towards commonsense reasoners operating on knowledge graphs and serve as a starting point for ongoing work on improving such systems. The dataset is available at https://github.com/a-brassard/copa-sse.