The Role of Pragmatics in Solving the Winograd Schema Challenge

Different aspects and approaches to commonsense reasoning have been investigated in order to provide solutions for the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC). The vast complexities of natural language processing (parsing, assigning word sense, integrating context, pragmatics and world-knowledge, ...) give broad appeal to systems based on statistical analysis of corpora. However, solutions based purely on learning from corpora are not currently able to capture the semantics underlying the WSC - which was intended to provide problems whose solution requires knowledge and reasoning, rather than statistical analysis of superficial lexical features. In this paper we consider the WSC as a means for highlighting challenges in the field of commonsense reasoning more generally. We begin by discussing issues with current approaches to the WSC. Following this we outline some key challenges faced, in particular highlighting the importance of dealing with pragmatics. We then argue for an alternative approach which favours the use of knowledge bases where the deep semantics of the different interpretations of commonsense terms are formalised. Furthermore, we suggest using heuristic approaches based on pragmatics to determine appropriate configurations of both reasonable interpretations of terms and necessary assumptions about the world.