SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Cao, Pengfei, Yang, Mingxuan, Chen, Yubo, Zhang, Chenlong, Liu, Mingxuan, Liu, Kang, Zhao, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866915883095425024
author Cao, Pengfei
Yang, Mingxuan
Chen, Yubo
Zhang, Chenlong
Liu, Mingxuan
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
author_facet Cao, Pengfei
Yang, Mingxuan
Chen, Yubo
Zhang, Chenlong
Liu, Mingxuan
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
contents Understanding why real-world events occur is important for both natural language processing and practical decision-making, yet direct-cause inference remains underexplored in evidence-rich settings. To address this gap, we organized SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning (AER).\footnote{The task data is available at https://github.com/sooo66/semeval2026-task12-dataset.git} The task asks systems to identify the most plausible direct cause of a target event from supporting evidence. We formulate AER as an evidence-grounded multiple-choice benchmark that captures key challenges of real-world causal reasoning, including distributed evidence, indirect background factors, and semantically related but non-causal distractors. The shared task attracted 122 participants and received 518 submissions. This paper presents the task formulation, dataset construction pipeline, evaluation setup, and system results. AER provides a focused benchmark for abductive reasoning over real-world events and highlights challenges for future work on causal reasoning and multi-document understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21720
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models
Cao, Pengfei
Yang, Mingxuan
Chen, Yubo
Zhang, Chenlong
Liu, Mingxuan
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding why real-world events occur is important for both natural language processing and practical decision-making, yet direct-cause inference remains underexplored in evidence-rich settings. To address this gap, we organized SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning (AER).\footnote{The task data is available at https://github.com/sooo66/semeval2026-task12-dataset.git} The task asks systems to identify the most plausible direct cause of a target event from supporting evidence. We formulate AER as an evidence-grounded multiple-choice benchmark that captures key challenges of real-world causal reasoning, including distributed evidence, indirect background factors, and semantically related but non-causal distractors. The shared task attracted 122 participants and received 518 submissions. This paper presents the task formulation, dataset construction pipeline, evaluation setup, and system results. AER provides a focused benchmark for abductive reasoning over real-world events and highlights challenges for future work on causal reasoning and multi-document understanding.
title SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21720