  We introduce Social IQa, the first largescale benchmark for commonsense
reasoning about social situations. Social IQa contains 38,000 multiple choice
questions for probing emotional and social intelligence in a variety of
everyday situations (e.g., Q: "Jordan wanted to tell Tracy a secret, so Jordan
leaned towards Tracy. Why did Jordan do this?" A: "Make sure no one else could
hear"). Through crowdsourcing, we collect commonsense questions along with
correct and incorrect answers about social interactions, using a new framework
that mitigates stylistic artifacts in incorrect answers by asking workers to
provide the right answer to a different but related question. Empirical results
show that our benchmark is challenging for existing question-answering models
based on pretrained language models, compared to human performance (>20% gap).
Notably, we further establish Social IQa as a resource for transfer learning of
commonsense knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple
commonsense reasoning tasks (Winograd Schemas, COPA).
