  We present a counterfactual recognition (CR) task, the shared Task 5 of
SemEval-2020. Counterfactuals describe potential outcomes (consequents)
produced by actions or circumstances that did not happen or cannot happen and
are counter to the facts (antecedent). Counterfactual thinking is an important
characteristic of the human cognitive system; it connects antecedents and
consequents with causal relations. Our task provides a benchmark for
counterfactual recognition in natural language with two subtasks. Subtask-1
aims to determine whether a given sentence is a counterfactual statement or
not. Subtask-2 requires the participating systems to extract the antecedent and
consequent in a given counterfactual statement. During the SemEval-2020
official evaluation period, we received 27 submissions to Subtask-1 and 11 to
Subtask-2. The data, baseline code, and leaderboard can be found at
https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/21691. The data and baseline code
are also available at https://zenodo.org/record/3932442.
