NORMBANK: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms
Year: 2023

Abstract:
We present NORMBANK, a knowledge bank of 155k situational norms. This resource is designed to ground flexible normative reasoning for interactive, assistive, and collaborative AI systems. Unlike prior commonsense resources, NORMBANK grounds each inference within a multivalent sociocultural frame, which includes the setting (e.g., restaurant), the agents’ contingent roles (waiter, customer), their attributes (age, gender), and other physical, social, and cultural constraints (e.g., the temperature or the country of operation). In total, NORMBANK contains 63k unique constraints from a taxonomy that we introduce and iteratively refine here. Constraints then apply in different combinations to frame social norms. Under these manipulations, norms are non-monotonic — one can cancel an inference by updating its frame even slightly. Still, we find evidence that neural models can help reliably extend the scope and coverage of NORMBANK. We further demonstrate the utility of this resource with a series of transfer experiments. For data and code, see https: //github.com/SALT-NLP/normbank

heading: 1 Introduction
text: As AI systems continually evolve for human assistance and collaboration, they will increasingly operate within cultural and social spaces, and require increasingly robust and flexible knowledge of social norms (Carlucci et al., 2015). From dialogue systems (Molnár and Szüts, 2018; Vaidyam et al., 2019; Bavaresco et al., 2020; Grossman et al., 2019) to socially interactive robots (Fong et al., 2003; Deng et al., 2019) and augmented or mixed reality technologies (Anderson and Rainie, 2022), each could benefit from understanding how humans effectively communicate, make decisions, engage with requests, and broadly interact with others (Sunstein, 1996; Sherif and Sherif, 1953).
Work done at Meta AI Research
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Natural language is flexible and highly expressive; thus it is a promising medium for encoding knowledge of social norms (Sap et al., 2019a). The goal of this work is to construct NORMBANK, a natural language bank of social norms that will allow AI systems to reason about social situations under complex constraints. NORMBANK encodes 155k norms via scalable human annotation, bootstrapped with implicit knowledge from large pre-trained language models (LLMs).
NORMBANK factors in two important considerations that have been previously overlooked. First: norms are not rigid truths; they are flexibly assumed standards that may be updated with new information from the social context (Blass and Horswill, 2015). Second: this social context is not a flat list of facts but a matrix of hierarchical dependencies (Hovy and Yang, 2021). These two considerations have important design implications for norm representations and reasoning in AI, inspiring two objectives for this work.
Objective 1 is to support non-monotonic reasoning (Reiter, 1981) over defeasible (Pollock, 1987) norms. This means inferences that hold under most cases can be updated or even retracted based on new information. For example, dancing is a positive behavior that is generally permitted in many casual settings and in many cultures. We can still strengthen or cancel this inference. On the one hand, dancing is expected from a professional dancer. But in an Islamic cultural context, individuals are forbidden from publicly dancing with members of the opposite sex. In a hospital setting, a young child is allowed to dance in the waiting room, but this behavior would not be expected from an adult visiting a dying relative For more examples, see Figure 1. This kind of reasoning will not always follow straightforward compositional logic (Klimczyk, 2021), and we expect it to be a challenge for AI systems.1 NORMBANK is the first data resource to support non-monotonic normative reasoning by encoding contrasting situations under which the same behavior could alternatively be expected or considered taboo (see §4).
There is a combinatorially explosive space of situational contexts, each with non-compositional and thus unpredictable norms. Enumerating the set of all possible constraints is intractable. To effi-
1Typically, it’s okay to drink soda while actively working and it’s okay for a waiter to drink soda; yet the intersection of these conditions is not typical. It is NOT okay for a waiter to drink soda while actively working.
ciently learn norms in this space, models can rely on the regularizing effects of hierarchical organization and social theory. NORMBANK introduces hierarchical organization (Objective 2) by means of a rich taxonomy over the relevant contextual signals that inform behaviors.
Our new SCENE taxonomy is the first to use Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory of social life. We operationalize the theory with settings that have additional environmental constraints. In each setting, there are agents with different roles and attributes, who then perform behaviors. Norms apply to behaviors in certain situations. For example, in Figure 1, norms around drinking hot coffee differ for agents with different roles (e.g., barista, customer) and attributes (e.g., adult, child), in different settings (e.g., cafe, classroom).
Having addressed the objectives above, we train neural models to expand NORMBANK with automatic knowledge completion. Experiments show promising results: these models can extrapolate social commonsense to new behaviors in new situations, leveraging similarities in analogous roles across different situations. Finally, we demonstrate how to transfer knowledge via sequential finetuning from NORMBANK to social reasoning tasks. Together, knowledge completion and transfer learning suggest that our dataset will serve as a useful resource for advancing neural models toward situationally-grounded social reasoning.

heading: 2 Related Work
text: Commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs) are sets of structured knowledge about everyday life. They capture broad taxonomic relationships (Liu and Singh, 2004; Speer et al., 2017; Elsahar et al., 2018), logical relations (Lenat, 1995; Zhang et al., 2018), and universal laws of causality and physical mechanics (Talmor et al., 2019; Bisk et al., 2020). More recent datasets encode social mechanics, like broad human values (Ziems et al., 2022; Hendrycks et al., 2021), situation-agnostic norms (Forbes et al., 2020; Fung et al., 2022), and prototypical rules of social behavior and motivation (Sap et al., 2019a; Huang et al., 2019). General purpose CSKBs like ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a) and Social-Chemistry101 (Forbes et al., 2020) can be converted into tasks like Social IQa (Sap et al., 2019b) and δ-NLI (Rudinger et al., 2020), plus injected into language models for downstream applications (Chang et al., 2020; Mitra et al., 2019; Ji et al., 2020a,b).
Norm discovery is an emerging method inspired by automatic knowledge base construction (Mitchell et al., 2018; Weston et al., 2013; Craven et al., 2000) and extracting social knowledge from LLMs via prompting (Trinh and Le, 2018; Petroni et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019; Sakaguchi et al., 2020). In concurrent work, Fung et al. (2022) propose NORMSAGE, which automatically discovers mandated or conventional behaviors from dialogues. Their prompts resemble our bootstrapping efforts in §3, with the added step of automatic self-verification. NORMBANK differs from NORMSAGE in that we rely on human annotation to collect more creatively non-prototypical situations to challenge and expand normative reasoning models.
Normative reasoning systems like Delphi (Jiang et al., 2021), and UNICORN (Lourie et al., 2021a) are pre-trained on existing social knowledge bases (Forbes et al., 2020; Emelin et al., 2021; Hendrycks et al., 2021; Lourie et al., 2021b; Sap et al., 2020), which contain more conventional social behaviors from narrative contexts. Until Pyatkin et al. (2022), in work concurrent to our own, normative reasoning systems have been framed as universal oracles, making forced-choice judgments about human behaviors in a vacuum (Talat et al., 2022). These models lack the capacity for defeasible reasoning (Madaan et al., 2021; Rudinger et al., 2020). Oracles instead tend to assume the most prototypical contexts (Boratko et al., 2020). Many of these predictions will appear reasonable if we pragmatically infer a conventional narrative, but for systems to achieve robust social intelligence, they must account for the long tail of the distribution. We can easily find unconventional contexts in which the correct inference contained in NORMBANK is misunderstood by current models.2

heading: 3 SCENE: A Dramaturgical Framework
text: The self... is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a SCENE.
— Erving Goffman (1959)
To help models efficiently learn non-monotonic normative reasoning over a seemingly unbounded
2For example, Delphi believes yelling and clenching your fists, breathing heavily, or asking someone personal questions about their sex life are all conventionally inappropriate. NORMBANK gives acceptable contexts for each: guests riding a roller coaster, athletes running track, and doctors performing routine checkups, respectively.
set of possible contexts, and to test this understanding in LLMs, we will need to establish a more tractable set of elements to represent this social matrix. For this purpose, we construct a hierarchical taxonomy of constraints, which we call Situational Constraints for social Expectations, Norms, and Etiquette (SCENE for short). SCENE follows Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model of social life. According to this model, people are like actors trying to maintain a social performance in front of an audience. Each actor performs a particular role as if in a scene from a movie. The scene is grounded in a particular setting, which includes aspects of the environment that inform the performance. Each scene also has a script (Schank and Abelson, 1977), which tells the actor what kinds of behaviors will be perceived as in-character or out-of-character. Additionally, the actor will embody socially meaningful attributes like age, gender, status, etc. These attributes may be relevant to the scene and the actors place in it. In Figure 2, the example setting is a restaurant where the environment is uncrowded and the hour is night. There are two primary roles of customer and server, and for norm formation, some relevant attributes include their respective genders, sexualities, and ages, which parameterize the behaviors that are appropriate for this dinner, such as dating and drinking alcohol.
Settings (e.g., banks, classrooms, homes, hospitals) are the loci of scripted social interactions (Schank and Abelson, 1977), and they frame all subsequent elements of NORMBANK, so we begin here with 129 distinct settings like amusement park, bus, and elevator. Settings derive from two popular knowledge resources. First, there are 80 settings from from ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017), a broad knowledge base of the words and phrases that people commonly use.3 There are another 255 settings from the “movie scene” label in the MovieGraphs (Vicol et al., 2018) resource—a collection of social situations that were depicted in movie clips.
The Environment contains signals that can trigger associative priming of social norms (e.g., the noise level of a study space; Aarts and Dijksterhuis). This portion of the taxonomy is designed to be broad and general-purpose, with a set of attributes that can refine any setting. Our taxonomy is based on a broad review of the literature on norm
3Settings were defined by head-entities with an IsA relationship to some tail in {place, location, area}. Manual inspection proved the usefulness of this heuristic.
formation and its relevant factors (van Rijswijk and Haans, 2018; Janicik and Bartel, 2003; Boyce et al., 2000; Russell and Ward, 1982; Durkheim, 1915). Importantly, the taxonomy is further refined through crowdsourced feedback (§4). Ultimately, our taxonomy grows to contain 404 environmental constraints. An extensive overview of the environmental constraints is given in Appendix B.1, but we summarize them here.
In the environment, there are important taxonomic subclasses of factors that inform norms. One subclass is time constraints, like seasonality (Janicik and Bartel, 2003), holidays and special customary observances (Durkheim, 1915), and another is the country of operation, which serves as a proxy for regional cultural differences (Meyer, 2014). We also include factors from environmental psychology (Bell et al., 2001) that involve the agent’s comfort and ease in the environment (e.g., noise level, privacy, and cleanliness). Additionally, physical conditions include factors like weather, which impact visibility, coordination, safety, and comfort (Boyce et al., 2000; van Rijswijk and Haans, 2018; Cunningham, 1979). In addition to the imposed taxonomy, annotator feedback (§4) lead us to add a subclass called restrictions that formally limit attendance, participation, and behavior, due to notions of formality, religiosity, or exclusiveness.
Roles may be ubiquitous, but it is challenging to collect reliable, setting-specific roles with high coverage. Our solution is to use the powerful associative knowledge of LLMs to automatically enumerate roles for each setting via prompting, inspired by Trinh and Le (2018), Petroni et al. (2019), and others (Wang et al., 2019; Sakaguchi et al., 2020). Specifically, we prompt GPT-3 (Brown et al.,
2020) text-davinci-002 in a zero-shot manner with the phrase “Some roles <preposition> <determiner> <setting>:” where the preposition and determiner are manually configured to match the setting (for example, “some roles at a casino:” or “some roles on the beach:”). On average, we generate 5.5 roles per setting, with a total of 928 unique roles.
Attributes are properties of individual agents that determine their social norms. Here again, the goal is to derive a general purpose taxonomy from the literature. Some attributes are basic demographic categories like the person’s age bracket, gender, race, religion, and sexuality (Thompson Jr and Pleck, 1986; Dempsey and De Vaus, 2004; Helgeson, 2016). Related demographic categories include education level, employment, and marital status. Since food is a focal point for culture and morality, we include diet. We also include material constraints like medical condition and social class. Finally, we increase the coverage of this set by including generic descriptors of two types: condition or state adjectives, which describe a temporary condition (e.g., dizzy), and characteristic adjectives that describe more permanent attributes (e.g., blonde). In total, our taxonomy defines 578 attribute constraints.
Behaviors are the primary target of analysis for social norms. As with roles, we co-opt GPT-3 to enumerate behaviors for each setting and role, but the approach here is augmented in two ways. First, we include a norm expectation in the prompt. By querying for unexpected behaviors, we can begin to shift the distribution of behaviors away from the prototypical. Second, we increase the diversity of generations by conditioning on
the agent’s attribute. This further reduces the number of conventional behaviors in our set. The prompt is “Some things you would (never) do <preposition> <determiner> <setting> (if you were <attribute>):” where elements in parentheses are optional elements. In this way, we generated an average of 776.5 behaviors per setting, which was filtered down to 112.6 behaviors per setting, via programmatic methods described in Appendix B.2.

heading: 4 Building NORMBANK
text: Section 3 gave us a high-recall set of constraint variables for explaining situational social norms. Our end goal is to build a resource that contains reliable norms to ground, train, and test automatic normative reasoning systems. We want these norms to describe challenging, non-prototypical examples, and to depend on subtly contrasting situations that, when shifted, change the norm label non-monotonically. This motivates us to use human annotation over the rich SCENE taxonomy.
Our process is essentially the reverse of the current paradigm established by prior work, which starts with a basic narrative context and subsequently extracts (Fung et al., 2022) or annotates (Forbes et al., 2020) the expected behaviors. Instead, we start with behaviors and ask annotators to provide us with different dramaturgical contexts (SCENE constraints) under which that behavior could be variously seen as expected, okay, or unexpected. Thus we obtain richer and less prototypical instances—examples not mentioned in standard dialogue, which will significantly challenge models. The approach is inspired by contrast sets (Gardner et al., 2020) and counterfactual augmentation (Kaushik et al., 2019) as means of reducing spurious correlations in model inferences.

heading: 4.1 Annotation Task
text: For the annotation task, we recruit experienced English-speaking Mechanical Turk annotators who have ≥98% acceptance with ≥100 HITs and are located in the United States. The task requires human creativity over a large combinatorial space. For a given setting s and a behavior b, an annotator will tell us distinct situational contexts under which b is alternatively expected (required by duty or anticipated with high probability), okay (permitted or anticipated with moderate probability), or unexpected (forbidden, stigmatized, taboo, or otherwise
anticipated with very low probability). These expected, okay, and unexpected categories are called “norm labels.” The language of expectation is useful for describing behavioral patterns— the focus of this work—rather than prescribing rules for what ought to be done, as in prior datasets (Ziems et al., 2022; Emelin et al., 2021; Lourie et al., 2021b; Forbes et al., 2020; Sap et al., 2020). Importantly, we do not impose any ethical or moral philosophy (Hendrycks et al., 2021), but instead, encourage annotators to find norms that merely describe observable social life (Cialdini et al., 1991).
The annotator fully specifies the appropriate situational context by means of disjunctions and conjunctions of constraints. For example, “spit at a dentist’s office” can be unexpected when (PERSON’s role is ‘dentist’) or when ((PERSON’s role is ‘patient’) AND (PERSON’s behavior is ‘checking in’)). Annotators select SCENE constraints using drop down menus that follow the hierarchy of §3 (for details on the HIT interface, see Appendix C.2). They are also free to insert their own custom constraints into the hierarchy. In this way, we iteratively expand the taxonomy.

heading: 4.2 Dataset Quality
text: Quality Control. Manual inspection of over 2.5k data points reveals that the open-ended and creative aspects of the task are natural incentives for high-quality work (Chandler et al., 2015; Sheehan, 2018). To further ensure the quality of NORMBANK, we trained annotators with careful instruction, a qualification test, a staging round, personalized feedback, programmatic filtering, and finally, a series of random audits (Litman et al., 2015; Sheehan, 2018). The instructions included at least 3 fully-worked examples for each norm label, plus suggestions and explanations for a total of 24 constraints. We administered a six-question qualifier, which tested workers’ knowledge of the taxonomy, definitions, free text response, and how to properly indicate constraint conjunctions and disjunctions through the task interface. If the worker passed at least five questions correctly on the first try, she would gain access to the staging round – a smallscale version of the task in which each submission would receive detailed and personalized feedback.
We invested a significant amount of time to feedback, offering 75 to 200 words of review for each of 2, 502 staging HITs. Once a worker submitted 3
high-quality HITs in the staging round, he or she could move to the full task. To identify poor work here, we programmatically flagged workers with extremely low variation in their annotations. Finally, we periodically performed a total of three random audits, sampling 250 annotations in each audit, to confirm the quality of the annotations. Workers were paid a base rate, plus an additional itemized bonus for every additional constraint they added, which incentivized workers to be more expressive and creative. Annotators received a median of $30 per hour for this task.
Quality Metrics. The above methods all proved remarkably successful in generating a creative and high-quality resource. Because our task is creative and subjective, data quality is not easily measured by inter-annotator agreement. We instead report human evaluations over the Gold NORMBANK data in the bottom row of Table 3 (alongside model generations from §5.1). Annotations are considered sensible (82.5%), relevant (82.17%), and normative (72.9%). Still, it is important to note that around half of gold annotations are marked by third-party evaluators as fully correct by majority vote.
With regard to the correctness metric, annotator disagreements can be traced to differences in the annotators’ models of the world, which likely stem from their own personal differences, including age, profession, and worldview. For example, an annotator likely familiar with the Cambodian tradition of “Pithi Srang Preah” marked that “honoring your ancestors” is normal for Cambodians on Cambodian New Year, while an annotator unfamiliar with this practice marked it as unexpected. Furthermore, we administered political leaning and the moral foundations surveys to all annotators, which we release alongside NORMBANK to help explain how these personal differences informed the probabilities they
assigned to events. This resource will be of interest to computer scientists and social scientists, since NORMBANK contains not only commonsense facts, but also culturally-conditioned distributions over behavior and expectations about behavior.

heading: 4.3 Dataset Summary
text: Summary Statistics. Table 1 gives the summary statistics for the annotated dataset. NORMBANK contains a total of 408k constraints, applied to 155k norms, for an average of 2.63 constraints per norm. The SCENE taxonomy broadly captures the kinds of constraints annotators were looking for 94% of the time, and they were able to find their exact con-
straint value from a pre-populated list in 69% cases. For concurrent behavior and attribute constraints, annotators had to input their own values in 59% and 33% of cases respectively, followed by 27% and 9% of cases for the environment and roles. Overall, this indicates that our GPT-3 prompting method achieved high recall, especially for roles, and least so for behaviors, which is unsurprising, given the almost unbounded space of viable human behavior.
Figure 3 gives the distribution of constraints in NORMBANK. Constraints are dominated most by the agent’s attributes and roles. Age, condition, and characteristic are the most popular attributes, while roles vary. There is an even split between behaviors and the environment. In the environment, there is a notable focus on time constraints, and slightly lesser but more even attention towards the remaining subcategories.
Links to Existing Knowledge. NORMBANK’s SCENE taxonomy has close links to existing knowledge resources. ConceptNet directly seeded 80 settings in SCENE. Beyond this, we successfully link over 90% of taxonomic items from the setting, environment, roles, and attributes directly with concepts in ConceptNet. These taxonomic items cover 93.6% of all constraint categories and 70.0% of all constraint values. ConceptNet is further linked to WordNet, DBPedia, Umbel, Cyc, and Wiktionary, so by extension, NORMBANK can be coupled to these resources.

heading: 5 Experiments: How to use NORMBANK
text: NORMBANK is not designed for any particular narrow task; it is designed as a general-purpose knowledge resource that can ground social reasoning through downstream tasks (compare ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a) and ConceptNet (Liu and Singh,
2004)). Towards this end, NORMBANK should contain richly organized knowledge that can be learned by neural models and applied for non-monotonic reasoning in new settings. In this way, it should be possible to automatically expand the NORMBANK resource. The knowledge contained here should also be applicable across a range of social reasoning tasks. Thus our experiments aim to demonstrate two things: (§5.1) that we can automatically expand NORMBANK using neural methods, and (§5.2) that NORMBANK is a useful resource with relevant knowledge for downstream applications. For all experiments in the following subsections, we use an 80%-10%-10% train-dev-test split in which <setting, behavior> tuples in one set are never seen in another.

heading: 5.1 Automatic Knowledge Completion
text: How can we expand NORMBANK? We considered two different methods of knowledge bank completion (Weston et al., 2013; Craven et al., 2000), which rely on different assumptions. Results from both methods indicate that NORMBANK is rich enough to support its own automatic expansion. Classification is the simpler case, where we assume a closed world (Bordes et al., 2013; Lin et al., 2015b,a; Socher et al., 2013), while generation assumes an open world (Shi and Weninger, 2018) with a modifiable set of constraints.
Classification. Here, our known constraints and behaviors (§3) will remain fixed (Shi and Weninger, 2018), but we can discover new relationships by classifying unseen behavior and constraint combinations as expected, okay, or unexpected. The advantage of this approach is that it is straightforward, and the disadvantage is that evaluating classifiers over the power set of the entire constraint space would be intractable; thus more efficient search methods will be needed.
For all norm classification tasks, we fine-tune three popular transformer models: BERT-baseuncased (Devlin et al., 2019), RoBERTa-base (Liu et al., 2019), and ALBERT-base-v2 (Lan et al., 2020), with hyperparameters in Appendix A. Results in Table 2 appear promising. Given the scope and scale of NORMBANK, models are capable of learning non-monotonic inferences, achieving F1 scores as high as 72.1% on the test set. This shows that classification is a reliable method for NORMBANK knowledge expansion.
model results are highlighted, while the best overall model results are bolded.
Generation. The model is trained with a forward language modeling objective over the string g:
g = {[SETTING], s1, s2, ..., sn, [BEHAVIOR], b1, b2, ..., bm,
[NORM],label,
[CONSTRAINTS]c11, c 1 2, ..., c 1 ℓ1 [AND]c21, c 2 2, ..., c 2 ℓ2 ... [AND]ck1 , c k 2 , ..., c k ℓk<EOS>}
At inference time, the model generates the list of constraints c1, ..., ck that will make the norm label true as it is conditioned on the setting s and behavior b. For this purpose, it is sufficient to use BART (Lewis et al., 2020), GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), and T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), three powerful language models used widely for generative inference. We also prompted GPT-3 davinci-002 and davinci-003 in a few-shot manner via the OpenAI API (see the prompts in Appendix A).
Evaluation comes from both automatic and human metrics. Humans evaluate 300 <setting, behavior> data points for each of the 11 Model × Decoding combinations, plus gold standard examples from NORMBANK. For constraints, they provide us the % NormC (proportion that helps represent a human rule or expectation for behavior) and % RelevantC (proportion that relates to the norm without redundancy or tautology). They also give us situation4 evals: are they % CorrectS (they produce an accurate norm label) and mutually % SensibleS (all constraints can be true at the same time).
4Situations are defined as the intersection of constraints
Table 3 gives the generation results for the three fine-tuned models: BART, GPT-2, and T-5. According to human judgment, all models produce text that successfully constrains human expectations for behavior (NormC ∼90%). BART + nucleus sampling (p = 0.9) gives the most SensibleS (100%) and CorrectS situations (46%) with the most RelevantC constraints (97%). This is clearly a challenging task: situations are deemed correct only 46% of the time. Yet they closely approach the scores of human gold-standard data (55%). Notably, generated constraints are highly relevant to the norm label and entirely mutually-sensible. Given the challenging nature of the task, the results are quite encouraging, suggesting that NORMBANK can facilitate its own expansion via natural language generation.
Prompting Results in Table 3 show that few-shot GPT-3 models fail to match our best performing BART model’s ability to generate Sensible situations (95 vs. 100%) with high %Norm (91.8 vs 94.3%) and %Relevant constraints (87.8 vs 97%). Still, annotators are more likely to find GPT-3 output to be Correct overall (61.1 vs 46%). Automatic metrics show that GPT-3 achieves higher precision (28.6 vs 23.1 BLEU) at the expense of recall (51.7 vs 77.1 ROUGE-L), suggesting that GPT-3’s generations, while often correct, may be more prototypical. Qualitative analysis confirms this.
Sometimes the conventional answer leads GPT3 astray, as when it uses a series of faulty lexical associations to explain that ‘drinking milk’ is unexpected on an ‘athletic field’ for individuals who are not the coach and for those whose behavior is not
‘hydrate’ while the temperature is ‘warm.’ BART, however, correctly discerns that it’s unexpected for athletes whose behavior is ‘playing sports.’ In general, GPT-3 appears more likely to underspecify the situation. For example, GPT-3 responds that it’s expected for a homeowner to ‘leave the gate open’ in the ‘backyard,’ and BART agrees, but BART further specifies that the owner might be ‘working outside’ to justify the expectation.
Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that prompting methods can certainly complement, but may not fully replace, fine-tuned generation approaches to NORMBANK expansion. A mixed approach may be most desirable due to coverage and correctness, while generation errors may be fixed using self-correction via classification (above) or further prompting (Fung et al., 2022).
Finally, the middle pane of Table 3 shows the proportion of generated constraints that fall into our taxonomy (Tax. Constr.) and the proportion contained in NORMBANK (Pre-pop. Constr.). The former shows that our taxonomy broadly captures the relevant axes (80-90% of our best models’ generations are taxonomic). The latter shows that between one third and one half of generations ‘link’ prior constraints to new situations; the rest of generated constraints are brand new.

heading: 5.2 Transfer Learning for Downstream Tasks
text: Finally, we conduct transfer learning experiments to demonstrate the utility of the data for downstream applications, further indicating the scope and power of NORMBANK as a general-purpose resource for social reasoning. Concretely, we follow the sequential training paradigm (Pratt et al., 1991), which has proven better than multitask training and fine-tuning on a broad range of commonsense tasks (Lourie et al., 2021a). Specifically, we initialize a RoBERTa model with weights from our best-performing norm classifier from Section 5.1 and fine-tune on the target set for 7 epochs.
We evaluate on two specifically moral reasoning tasks, Anecdotes and Dilemmas, both from the SCRUPLES benchmark (Lourie et al., 2021b). We also consider two multiple-choice commonsense QA datasets. Social IQa (Sap et al., 2019b) is designed to test social intelligence (e.g., inferring motivations, emotional reactions), while CosmosQA (Huang et al., 2019) tests cause and effect and counterfactual reasoning in everyday situations.
All results in Table 4 are averaged over five sepa-
rate train-test runs, and significance is given by the paired bootstrap test. NORMBANK’s utility is seen by comparing the accuracy of models with transfer learning from NORMBANK against those with task-only fine-tuning (Base Model). Results show that NORMBANK improves situational moral classification (Anecdotes; +0.4%) and forced choice binary moral judgments (Dilemmas +6.8%) with significance. Also consider NORMBANK utility as compared to transfer learning from either CosmosQA (CQA) or SocialIQa (SIQA). The only task on which transfer from NORMBANK does not achieve the best performance is on CosmosQA evaluation. Here, we find that transfer from the more structurally related Social IQa task is preferred. We conclude that NORMBANK is a useful resource for a range of downstream applications in moral, social, and emotional reasoning in context.

heading: 6 Conclusion
text: Social norms are the foundation of culture and society (McDonald and Crandall, 2015; Hogg and Reid, 2006), and an understanding of these norms is crucial for assistive and collaborative AI. In this work, we introduced SCENE a new scheme for hierarchically organizing the seemingly unbounded space of situational contexts that determine social norms. With this framework, we built NORMBANK, the first social knowledge bank to leverage such contextual information for contrast sets of richly conditioned defeasible social norms. We found that NORMBANK supports its own automatic expansion via classification, generation, and prompting methods. Finally, we demonstrated the utility of NORMBANK for situational social reasoning tasks.

heading: 7 Limitations
text: At its core, NORMBANK is a collection of logical operations on unique constraints. Consequently, one practical limitation stems from the issue that some situations cannot be reasonably expressed as a set of constraints. While theoretically all logic can be decomposed into AND and OR operations, the logic may be too challenging for an individual to formulate, or the set of constraints themselves might be too large and unwieldy. The latter is problematic, because language models have a finite input token capacity, and for the set of constraints to be digestible, they must fit within that capacity. Relatedly, if the logic to encode constraints become more sophisticated, ensuring that logic is not unnecessarily duplicated will pose a greater challenge. Additionally, certain properties of NORMBANK like the role and behaviors may be challenging to succinctly describe. Further work will be needed to ascertain how these can be incorporated or to more clearly define situations that are out of scope.
Due to limitations on time and computational resources, we have not exhaustively evaluated all downstream applications of NORMBANK, and in future work, we will test additional transfer tasks beyond the moral and social classification tasks considered in this work. Since NORMBANK is the first to encode non-monotonic situational norms, there was no other available benchmark that is directly analogous to ours. Instead, our primary evidence for NormBank’s utility is in Table 3, where human evaluators confirm that models trained on NORMBANK can reliably learn to make new inferences about non-monotonic situational norms.
Other follow up studies should consider training larger normative reasoning models, and/or engineering better prompts for expanding NORMBANK. Relatedly, we have no data to speculate about the long-term evolution of real-world norms relative to this resource, nor the rate of decay in the reliability of NORMBANK. Future work should also expand this resource with perspectives from cultures other than our available annotator pool. The pool was not representative of all cultures and people groups, as we discuss further in the Ethics section.

heading: 8 Ethics
text: Ethical Assumptions. First, to set proper boundaries on this resource and the tasks it can facilitate, we will outline the ethical assumptions of this work and address some potential misconceptions. We
want to stress that NORMBANK represents a collection of situational norms that we do not treat as prescriptive, but rather descriptive. Unlike prior moral / ethics datasets (Ziems et al., 2022; Emelin et al., 2021; Lourie et al., 2021b; Forbes et al., 2020; Sap et al., 2020), we use the neutral language of expected, okay, and unexpected behaviors to focus on empirically observed patterns and avoid an overemphasis on the ethical grey area of what ought to be done. Unlike tricky moral dilemmas, the situational social norms of NORMBANK have an answer that a majority can agree is descriptively observable as the expectation under the respective conditions and/or cultural context. Nevertheless, normative judgments can vary between individuals in different social groups and time periods (Haidt et al., 1993; Shweder, 1990; Bicchieri, 2005; Culley and Madhavan, 2013; Amaya et al., 2021). NORMBANK can and should be expanded via automatic or manual methods that can incorporate these axes of variation. Our annotator pool was limited to English-speaking individuals living in the United States in the year 2022. Future expansion efforts could be crowdsourced from other cultures and geographic regions and in future decades.
We reiterate that the norms in NORMBANK should not be used for prescriptive advice or personal guidance in any way. Our work intends to unlock future work in the capacity to imbue language models with situational commonsense and enable them to jointly reason with the situational contexts. Language models which ignore situational contexts altogether may be just as hazardous, if not more.
Finally, there are likely biases towards certain roles and values in NORMBANK. We have taken steps to mitigate some forms, such as gender bias, by neutralizing constraints (e.g., [PERSON]’s role is ‘cowboy or cowgirl’ and [PERSON]’s role is ‘ball boy or girl’). Our SCENE taxonomy, with the standardized structure of its role and attribute constraints, will allow practitioners to further analyze specific axes of prejudice and thus implement targeted mitigation strategies. Specific identity attributes like gender, ethnicity, and religion are represented in 24% of norms.5 Stakeholders can invest a smaller but more concerted effort towards mitigating bias in these constraints. We encourage
5There are 40k norms (out of 169k total norms; 24%) which cover attributes in the following set: {‘country’, ‘age bracket’, ‘education’, ‘gender’, ‘race or ethnicity’, ‘religion’, ‘sexuality’, ‘social class’}
stakeholders to give auditing control over a given norm to those who are affected by it. Previous norm-datasets encode norms in free-text annotations which lack a hierarchical taxonomy of contexts, but our taxonomy can be used to interpret, diagnose, and mitigate prejudice, and to return power to those affected by these prejudices.
Risks in deployment. Before starting any annotation, the resources and findings presented in this work were thoroughly reviewed and approved by an internal review board. Prior to being put into production, the method would also need to be re-evaluated when applied to a new domain to ensure reliable performance in order to prevent unintended consequences. To help mitigate risks in deployment from misunderstandings about the ethical assumptions above, we require users of this data to complete a Data Use Agreement. The user will check that they understand the ethical assumptions above: especially that NORMBANK is not to be taken for advice. Practitioners will also agree not to use NORMBANK for malicious purposes “including (but not limited to): mockery, discrimination, and hate speech.”

heading: Acknowledgements
text: We are thankful to Julia Kruk, William Held, Albert Lu, Camille Harris, and the anonymous ACL reviewers for their helpful feedback. Caleb Ziems is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-2039655.

heading: A Models & Hyperparameters
text: Classification. We use the base versions of BERT (Devlin et al.; 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters), RoBERTa (Liu et al.; 768-hidden, 12-heads, 125M parameters), and ALBERT-v2 (Lan et al.; 768-hidden, 12-heads, 11M parameters). For each model, we fine-tune using AdamW (Loshchilov and Hutter, 2019) for 7 epochs with a batch size of 16 and a learning rate of 1e−5. These hyperparameters were chosen by hyperparameter search on the dev set over {1e− 5, 2e− 5, 3e− 5, 5e− 5} and the number of epochs in {1..8}, with ϵ = 1e − 8 and the batch size set to 16.
Generation. We trained BART-large (406M parameters), GPT-2 (768-hidden, 12-heads, 117M parameters), and T5-small (512-hidden, 8 heads, 60M parameters) for 1 epoch using a batch size of 8 and a learning rate of 3e− 5. We also prompted GPT-3 Davinci-002 and Davinci-003 in a few-shot manner via the OpenAI API, using the following prompt, which contains seven representative datapoints from the NORMBANK train set:

heading: It is UNEXPECTED to "talk about sex" at an "cafe" when:
text: + PERSON’s role is ’barista’

heading: It is OKAY to "listen to music" in an "arcade" when all of
text: ↪→ the following are true: + PERSON’s role is not ’cook’ + PERSON’s role is not ’maintenance worker’ + PERSON’s behavior is ’wear headphones’

heading: It is EXPECTED to "hang film to dry" at the "darkroom" when
text: ↪→ all of the following are true: + PERSON’s role is ’darkroom technician’ + PERSON’s behavior is ’performing routine tasks’

heading: It is OKAY to "smoke a cigar" in a "limousine" when all of
text: ↪→ the following are true: + OTHER’s age bracket is not ’gradeschooler or younger’ + OTHER’s attitude towards smoking is not ’bothered by smoke’
↪→ + PERSON’s age bracket is ’adult’ + limousine rules is not ’forbids smoking’

heading: It is EXPECTED to "maintain the store appearance" at the "
text: ↪→ clothing store" when all of the following are true: + PERSON’s role is ’store owner’

heading: It is OKAY to "talk to yourself" on an "airplane" when all
text: ↪→ of the following are true: + PERSON’s role is ’passenger’ + PERSON’s behavior is ’pray’

heading: It is UNEXPECTED to "grow tomatoes" in a "garden" when all
text: ↪→ of the following are true: + PERSON’s behavior is not ’use a greenhouse’ + temperature is ’freezing’

heading: It is {norm} to "{behavior}" {prep} {det} "{setting}" when
text: ↪→ all of the following are true: +

heading: B Additional Details on Constructing SCENE
text: B.1 The Environment Country of Operation is seeded with the 195 countries from the UN (2022) list of member or non-member observer states.
Operational Factors is a broad category of constraints from environmental psychology (Bell et al., 2001) involving one’s comfort and ease of operation in an environment. Such factors influence descriptive norms. Operational behaviors can be influenced by the degree of sensory stimulation, as well as by privacy and proxemics, or the local density and organization of persons and objects (Russell and Ward, 1982). These inform the following subcategories: attendance {empty, there are people around, crowded} (Altman, 1975); cleanliness {dirty, clean} (Vilnai-Yavetz and Gilboa, 2010; Cialdini et al., 1990); noise {quiet, moderate, loud} (Mathews and Canon, 1975); population density {urban, suburban, rural} (Scott et al., 2007); and privacy {private, public} (Altman, 1975).
Physical Conditions in the environment can influence behavior mechanically as well as psychologically. Specifically, the lighting {bright, moderate, dim, dark}, weather {blizzard, clear, cloudy, ...}, and temperature {freezing, cold, temperate, hot} can directly impact visibility, coordination, and the perception of safety (Boyce et al., 2000; van Rijswijk and Haans, 2018), as well as comfort, confidence, and altruism (Cunningham, 1979).
Restrictions formally limit attendance, participation, and behavior. The environment can be one of exclusion {adults only, men only, women only}, formality {formal, informal} or religiosity {sacred, secular}. These categories are not part of our original theoretical taxonomy but were introduced through annotator feedback (See Section 4).
Special Observances include cultural observances like holidays {Advent, Holi, Lunar New Year} as well other special events {bat mitzvah, housewarming, quinceañera}, which evoke distinct rituals, customs and norms (Durkheim, 1915).
Time constraints include day of the week, season, time of day, and time period. Like special observances, much of human activity adheres to a set of temporal constraints and cues (Janicik and Bartel, 2003).
B.2 Behaviors
Since the average string length of behaviors was greater and thus more prone to error, we applied a suite of programmatic cleaning and filtering techniques, followed by a manual filtering round that reduced the average to 112.6 clean and non-
redundant behaviors per setting. The filtering techniques are as follows:
1. Remove any conditional form “if you were...” as well as any mention of the role or the setting in the behavior itself
2. Remove elaborations on behaviors “<behavior> because ... <elaboration>”
3. Normalize the logical form by removing words that negate behaviors (do not, never, not, forget to, refuse to, fail to, anything, something, anyone, someone, in any way, any)
4. Remove biased terms like properly, should, would, try to, be able to, and see someone.
5. Remove any bullet points or stray characters
6. Require that the behavior has an active (not passive) verb in it and that the verb does not have an explicit subject and that there is no dependent clause (as indicated by the marker [mark] dependency).

heading: C Annotation Task Details
text: C.1 Qualification Task To qualify for the HIT, workers were required to pass the following qualifying test, answering at least 5 out of 6 questions correctly.
1. True or False: you are allowed to add your own Constraints by typing them directly into the box. [Answer: True]
2. True or False: “carry a gun” can be an “Expected” behavior on an Airplane. [Answer: True]
3. True or False: “read a book” is an “Expected” behavior for a passenger on an Airplane. [Answer: False]
4. True or False: it is possible for a BEHAVIOR to be both “Expected” and “Okay” under the same Constraints. [Answer: False]
5. Let’s say you are adding some Constraints for when “eating shrimp” is “Unexpected” in the SETTING: restaurant. You know that shellfish are disallowed in both Hinduism and Judaism, as well as by the vegan and vegetarian diets. You are thinking of adding these in the following Constraint table. Is this correct? [Answer: Incorrect]
(PERSON’s religion is Judaism) AND (PERSON’s religion is Hinduism) AND (PERSON’s diet is vegan) AND (PERSON’s diet is vegetarian)
6. Let’s say you are adding some Constraints for when "eating shrimp" is "Okay" in the SETTING: restaurant. You know that shellfish are disallowed in both Hinduism and Judaism, as well as by the vegan and vegetarian diets. You are thinking of adding these in the following Constraint table. Is this correct? [Answer: Correct]
(PERSON’s religion is NOT Judaism) AND (PERSON’s religion is NOT Hinduism) AND (PERSON’s diet is NOT vegan) AND (PERSON’s diet is NOT vegetarian)
C.2 HIT Interface For each HIT, the annotator is presented with a setting s ∈ S and a behavior b ∈ B that we generated for the given s. The annotator helps us describe when this behavior would be expected; then describes when it is merely okay; and finally unexpected. Annotators describe each norm with the conjunction and disjunction of SCENE constraints. The annotator appends each constraint to its conjunction as a 4-tuple consisting of a (1) category, (2) name, (3) relation, and (4) value. These are shown with examples in the HIT Instructions (4) and HIT Interface (Figure 5) screenshots. The category helps annotators search for constraints and organize their thoughts. The category is a high-level designation of where the constraint is organized: according to the environment, role, attribute, or behavior. The name, relation and value constitute a standard semantic triple. The name designates the subject of the constraint, and it a specification of the category, like the “temperature of the environment.” The relation is a logical type that includes equality and inequality. The value designates the predicate of the constraint (e.g., “freezing”).
Annotators can build constraint 4-tuples from drop-down menus that enumerate our hierarchical taxonomy (Section 3). Annotators can also freely edit the above fields and contribute novel constraints. Finally, annotators compose constraints into disjunctive normal form (DNF), the OR of ANDs, to describe when behaviors are expected, okay, or unexpected in a given setting.
ACL 2023 Responsible NLP Checklist

heading: A For every submission:

heading: 3 A1. Did you describe the limitations of your work?
text: Section 7 (Page 9)

heading: 3 A2. Did you discuss any potential risks of your work?
text: Section 8 (Page 9)

heading: 3 A3. Do the abstract and introduction summarize the paper’s main claims?
text: Abstract and Section 1
7 A4. Have you used AI writing assistants when working on this paper? Left blank.
B 3 Did you use or create scientific artifacts? Sections 3-4

heading: 3 B1. Did you cite the creators of artifacts you used?
text: Sections 3-4

heading: 3 B2. Did you discuss the license or terms for use and / or distribution of any artifacts?
text: Section 8

heading: 3 B3. Did you discuss if your use of existing artifact(s) was consistent with their intended use, provided
text: that it was specified? For the artifacts you create, do you specify intended use and whether that is compatible with the original access conditions (in particular, derivatives of data accessed for research purposes should not be used outside of research contexts)? Section 8

heading: 3 B4. Did you discuss the steps taken to check whether the data that was collected / used contains any
text: information that names or uniquely identifies individual people or offensive content, and the steps taken to protect / anonymize it? Section 8

heading: 3 B5. Did you provide documentation of the artifacts, e.g., coverage of domains, languages, and
text: linguistic phenomena, demographic groups represented, etc.? Section 4, 8
3 B6. Did you report relevant statistics like the number of examples, details of train / test / dev splits, etc. for the data that you used / created? Even for commonly-used benchmark datasets, include the number of examples in train / validation / test splits, as these provide necessary context for a reader to understand experimental results. For example, small differences in accuracy on large test sets may be significant, while on small test sets they may not be. Table 1
C 3 Did you run computational experiments? Section 5

heading: 3 C1. Did you report the number of parameters in the models used, the total computational budget
text: (e.g., GPU hours), and computing infrastructure used? Appendix D
The Responsible NLP Checklist used at ACL 2023 is adopted from NAACL 2022, with the addition of a question on AI writing assistance.

heading: 3 C2. Did you discuss the experimental setup, including hyperparameter search and best-found
text: hyperparameter values? Appendix D

heading: 3 C3. Did you report descriptive statistics about your results (e.g., error bars around results, summary
text: statistics from sets of experiments), and is it transparent whether you are reporting the max, mean, etc. or just a single run? Section 5; Table 4

heading: 3 C4. If you used existing packages (e.g., for preprocessing, for normalization, or for evaluation), did
text: you report the implementation, model, and parameter settings used (e.g., NLTK, Spacy, ROUGE, etc.)? Section 5
D 3 Did you use human annotators (e.g., crowdworkers) or research with human participants? Section 4

heading: 3 D1. Did you report the full text of instructions given to participants, including e.g., screenshots,
text: disclaimers of any risks to participants or annotators, etc.? Appendix B

heading: 3 D2. Did you report information about how you recruited (e.g., crowdsourcing platform, students)
text: and paid participants, and discuss if such payment is adequate given the participants’ demographic (e.g., country of residence)? Section 4

heading: 3 D3. Did you discuss whether and how consent was obtained from people whose data you’re using/curating? For example, if you collected data via crowdsourcing, did your instructions to
text: crowdworkers explain how the data would be used? Section 4

heading: 3 D4. Was the data collection protocol approved (or determined exempt) by an ethics review board?
text: Section 8

heading: 3 D5. Did you report the basic demographic and geographic characteristics of the annotator population that is the source of the data?
text: Section 4

heading: Future Work
text: Future expansion efforts could be crowdsourced from other cultures and geographic regions and in future decades. We reiterate that the norms in NORMBANK should not be used for prescriptive advice or personal guidance in any way. Our work intends to unlock future work in the capacity to imbue language models with situational commonsense and enable them to jointly reason with the situational contexts. Language models which ignore situational contexts altogether may be just as hazardous, if not more. Finally, there are likely biases towards certain roles and values in NORMBANK. We have taken steps to mitigate some forms, such as gender bias, by neutralizing constraints (e. g. , [PERSON]’s role is ‘cowboy or cowgirl’ and [PERSON]’s role is ‘ball boy or girl’). Our SCENE taxonomy, with the standardized structure of its role and attribute constraints, will allow practitioners to further analyze specific axes of prejudice and thus implement targeted mitigation strategies. Specific identity attributes like gender, ethnicity, and religion are represented in 24% of norms. 5 Stakeholders can invest a smaller but more concerted effort towards mitigating bias in these constraints. We encourage
5There are 40k norms (out of 169k total norms; 24%) which cover attributes in the following set: {‘country’, ‘age bracket’, ‘education’, ‘gender’, ‘race or ethnicity’, ‘religion’, ‘sexuality’, ‘social class’}
stakeholders to give auditing control over a given norm to those who are affected by it. Previous norm-datasets encode norms in free-text annotations which lack a hierarchical taxonomy of contexts, but our taxonomy can be used to interpret, diagnose, and mitigate prejudice, and to return power to those affected by these prejudices. Risks in deployment. Before starting any annotation, the resources and findings presented in this work were thoroughly reviewed and approved by an internal review board. Prior to being put into production, the method would also need to be re-evaluated when applied to a new domain to ensure reliable performance in order to prevent unintended consequences. To help mitigate risks in deployment from misunderstandings about the ethical assumptions above, we require users of this data to complete a Data Use Agreement. The user will check that they understand the ethical assumptions above: especially that NORMBANK is not to be taken for advice. Practitioners will also agree not to use NORMBANK for malicious purposes “including (but not limited to): mockery, discrimination, and hate speech. ”