wayneworkman2012/ww2-temporal-reasoning

WWII Temporal Reasoning

A very large synthetic question-answering dataset of calendar arithmetic over World War II events: how many days or years separate two events, what weekday a date fell on, which of several events came first, how long a campaign ran, whether a claimed date or ordering is correct, and dozens of related question shapes -- plus the reverse lookup, what happened on a given date.

Every answer is computed by code, not written freehand. The event names and their dates were extracted from curated Wikipedia articles by Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and verified against the articles; question and answer phrasing templates were authored by Qwen3.6-27B and Kimi K3 (and, for the events_on_date subset, by Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B) and filtered through deterministic structural validation and a review pass; a Python assembler fills the templates and computes each answer with actual calendar arithmetic, or, for events_on_date, looks up the event(s) the articles place on the asked-about date. The language models served as extraction and phrasing tools only; the dates, the arithmetic and the date lookups are grounded and machine-checked.

Honest about arithmetic, by design

This dataset is built for small models that do not have the capacity to do arithmetic reliably, and it teaches them to be honest about that instead of guessing. Two behaviors are trained:

• —What small models CAN do reliably is answered directly: recalling an event's date, naming the event or events that fall on a given date, deciding which of two or three events came first, confirming or correcting a claimed date, weekday, or year.
• —What they cannot do (precise interval arithmetic: exact day, week, month, or year counts between dates) is answered with an honest statement that the model cannot compute the interval reliably, followed by what it does know: the dates themselves and their ordering. Each such answer then ends with a machine-readable marker of the form [interval: 1939-01 → 1940-12-18] carrying the exact operand dates. Downstream tooling can parse that marker and hand it to a real calculator, so the model powers precise date arithmetic without ever pretending to perform it.

A verbatim example from the elapsed_ymd subset:

user: how long is the period from 16 Mar. 1942 to August 5, 1942 assistant: To be upfront: I don't trust myself to compute the precise duration. What I'm confident about is that 16 Mar. 1942 (16 Mar. 1942) came before August 5, 1942 (August 5, 1942). [interval: 1942-03-16 → 1942-08-05]

• —Total examples: 737,317,449
• —Subsets (configs): 55, one per question shape
• —Format: each row holds a messages conversation (user question, assistant answer), a stable id, its shape, a source_text grounding snippet naming the event(s) and date(s) used, and a metadata JSON string with the computation operands (dates, precisions, labels). For events_on_date the metadata also carries the article sentence that dates each event (source_text) and each event's id and source article title.
• —License: Apache 2.0 (apache-2.0). Every record is new work: the questions and answers were generated from event dates recorded in curated English Wikipedia articles (listed under Source articles below), and no article text is reproduced in them. The one place article text appears is the events_on_date subset's source_text, which quotes the article sentence that dates each event, for traceability.

The other direction: what happened on a date

Every other subset starts from an event and asks about its date. The events_on_date subset starts from the date: "What happened on 6 June 1944?" The answer names the one event the source articles place on that day, or opens with a lead-in and lists the several that fall on it as prose (comma-separated up to six, semicolons beyond), always in the same canonical order. Every day-precision date in the event inventory (4,504 dates) has exactly 20 records, each with a different question phrasing, so the lookup is learned from many angles rather than from one template. The question writes the date in the full range of styles used elsewhere in the dataset (prose forms, numeric, ISO); the answer restates it in prose.

A verbatim example from the events_on_date subset:

user: What occurred on Jan 3, 1939, if you don't mind me asking? assistant: Two events are connected to the day you gave, January 3, 1939: the end of the 75th Congress and the start of the 76th United States Congress.

Recommended mix

The sampling rates we use for our own training runs (a small WWII specialist model). A rate of 1.0 means every record; 0.1 means a 10% sample. The interval subsets teach ONE response behavior that saturates quickly — including them at full volume risks teaching the model to over-decline, so sample them down. For the sampled subsets, we recommend drawing a FRESH sample for each distinct training epoch: keep the ratio the same, but change which records are sampled, so repeated epochs see new phrasings and event pairs instead of re-memorizing one fixed slice.

Subsets

The value column is assessed for our own use case: a small WWII language model that memorizes the facts and defers precise arithmetic. It is not necessarily the value for other use cases -- for example, if the calculator-deferral behavior is what you are after, the honesty subsets rated "saturates fast" are the core of the dataset for you.

Intended use

Training small language models to handle temporal questions within their actual capacity: reliable date recall, ordering, and verification, plus honest deferral of precise arithmetic with a calculator-ready interval marker in place of a guessed number. Also usable for evaluating temporal grounding and for studying honesty-about-capability training. The dataset pairs naturally with its sibling, the broader WWII synthetic corpus published in this namespace.

Provenance and limitations

Event dates carry their precision (day, month, or year); questions only ask what their operands' precision supports; the events_on_date subset covers day-precision dates only. Phrasing variety is bounded by the template pools. All content is in English. Dates and events reflect the underlying encyclopedia articles at extraction time.

Source articles

The event inventory was extracted from these 302 articles on English Wikipedia. The article text was retrieved from live Wikipedia in July 2026, and the event extraction ran against that snapshot in August 2026:

<details> <summary>Show all 302 source articles</summary>

• —World War II
• —Pacific War
• —Eastern Front (World War II))
• —Battle of the Atlantic
• —North African campaign
• —Italian campaign (World War II))
• —Burma campaign
• —Second Sino-Japanese War
• —Spanish Civil War
• —Winter War
• —Greek Civil War
• —Greco-Italian War
• —Tunisian campaign
• —Kokoda Track campaign
• —Outline of World War II
• —Nazi Germany
• —Axis powers
• —Fascism
• —Nazi Party
• —Communism
• —Stalinism
• —Vichy France
• —Free France
• —New Order (Nazism))
• —Economy of Nazi Germany
• —Law of Nazi Germany
• —Great Depression
• —Interwar period
• —Great Depression in the United States
• —Timeline of the Weimar Republic
• —Beer Hall Putsch
• —Night of the Long Knives
• —Hossbach Memorandum
• —Mukden incident
• —Venlo incident
• —Winston Churchill
• —Franklin D. Roosevelt
• —Joseph Stalin
• —Harry S. Truman
• —Dwight D. Eisenhower
• —Charles de Gaulle
• —Chiang Kai-shek
• —Josip Broz Tito
• —Neville Chamberlain
• —Andrei Zhdanov
• —Hugh Dowding
• —Vannevar Bush
• —Leslie Groves
• —Adolf Hitler
• —Hirohito
• —Benito Mussolini
• —Hideki Tojo
• —Heinrich Himmler
• —Joseph Goebbels
• —Joachim von Ribbentrop
• —Ion Antonescu
• —Emil Hácha
• —Pierre Laval
• —Vidkun Quisling
• —Ante Pavelić
• —Führer
• —Hitler cabinet
• —Schutzstaffel
• —Gestapo
• —Nazi Party Chancellery
• —Reichskommissariat Ostland
• —General Government
• —Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War
• —Führer Headquarters
• —Concentration Camps Inspectorate
• —Four Year Plan
• —Operation Barbarossa
• —Operation Overlord
• —Operation Torch
• —Operation Weserübung
• —Operation Downfall
• —Allied invasion of Italy
• —Battle of France
• —Battle of Britain
• —Battle of Stalingrad
• —The Blitz
• —Operation Diadem
• —Operation Crossbow
• —Combined Bomber Offensive
• —Area bombing directive
• —Invasion of Iceland
• —Battle of Anzio
• —Battle of the Ruhr
• —Battle of Britain Day
• —Battle of Java (1942))
• —Battle of the Beams
• —Battle of Alam el Halfa
• —Battle of the St. Lawrence
• —Naval Battle of Casablanca
• —Leningrad strategic defensive
• —Coventry Blitz
• —The Holocaust
• —Final Solution
• —Wannsee Conference
• —Nazi concentration camps
• —Aktion T4
• —Generalplan Ost
• —Nacht und Nebel
• —Sonderaktion 1005
• —Death marches during the Holocaust
• —The Holocaust in the Netherlands
• —The Holocaust in Russia
• —The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia
• —Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust
• —Knowledge of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe
• —Forced labor in Nazi concentration camps
• —Nazi human experimentation
• —International response to the Holocaust
• —History of the Jews during World War II
• —Emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe
• —Polish Righteous Among the Nations
• —War crimes of the Wehrmacht
• —War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
• —War crimes in Manchukuo
• —Genocide of Poles by Nazi Germany
• —Criminal orders (Nazi Germany))
• —Commando Order
• —Commissar Order
• —Laconia Order
• —Rumbula massacre
• —Vinnytsia massacre
• —Soviet atrocities committed against prisoners of war during World War II
• —German atrocities committed against prisoners of war during World War II
• —German anti-partisan operations in World War II
• —United Nations War Crimes Commission
• —Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
• —Yalta Conference
• —Potsdam Conference
• —Tehran Conference
• —Casablanca Conference
• —Cairo Conference
• —Second Cairo Conference
• —Malta Conference (1945))
• —Arcadia Conference
• —Second Quebec Conference
• —Dumbarton Oaks Conference
• —Bretton Woods Conference
• —Moscow Conference (1945))
• —Moscow Declarations
• —Potsdam Declaration
• —Berlin Declaration (1945))
• —Lend-Lease
• —Destroyers-for-bases deal
• —Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942
• —Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact
• —Percentages agreement
• —Morgenthau Plan
• —Armistice of Cassibile
• —Armistice of Malta
• —Surrender at Caserta
• —Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy
• —Enigma machine
• —Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
• —Polish Enigma double
• —Magic (cryptography))
• —TICOM
• —Japanese naval codes
• —Japanese army and diplomatic codes
• —Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher
• —German Army cryptographic systems of World War II
• —Special Operations Executive
• —Office of Strategic Services
• —Allied Intelligence Bureau
• —Red Orchestra (espionage))
• —Cipher Bureau (Poland))
• —Propaganda in World War II
• —Propaganda in Nazi Germany
• —Propaganda in the Soviet Union
• —British propaganda during World War II
• —Propaganda in Fascist Italy
• —Propaganda in Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II
• —Reichspropagandaleitung
• —Manhattan Project
• —V-2 rocket
• —V-1 flying bomb
• —V-weapons
• —V-1 and V-2 intelligence
• —Tanks in World War II
• —U-boat
• —Submarine pen
• —List of jet aircraft of World War II
• —Aircraft of the Battle of Britain
• —Strategic bombing during World War II
• —History of penicillin
• —509th Composite Group
• —Laconia incident
• —Royal Navy during the Second World War
• —Convoy battles of World War II
• —Aircraft carrier operations during World War II
• —List of aircraft carriers of World War II
• —List of submarines of World War II
• —Allied landing craft in World War II
• —HX convoys
• —SC convoys
• —Gibraltar convoys of World War II
• —Town-class destroyer
• —Resistance during World War II
• —German resistance to Nazism
• —Schwarze Kapelle
• —Home Army
• —Italian resistance movement
• —Danish resistance movement
• —Norwegian resistance movement
• —Dutch resistance
• —Belgian Resistance
• —Luxembourg Resistance
• —Soviet partisans
• —Jewish partisans
• —Secret Army (Belgium))
• —Women in the French Resistance
• —History of women in the Italian Resistance
• —Resistance movement in Auschwitz
• —Buchenwald Resistance
• —Estonian anti-German resistance movement 1941–1944
• —Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
• —Collaboration with Imperial Japan
• —Government of Vichy France
• —German occupation of the Channel Islands
• —German occupation of Rome
• —German military administration in occupied France during World War II
• —Japanese occupation of Nauru
• —Japanese occupation of the Gilbert Islands
• —Japanese occupation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
• —History of Poland (1939–1945))
• —Belgian government in exile
• —Luxembourg government in exile
• —Dutch government-in-exile
• —Czechoslovak government-in-exile
• —Yugoslav government-in-exile
• —Home front during World War II
• —United States home front during World War II
• —Soviet home front during World War II
• —Australian home front during World War II
• —Women in World War II
• —Military production during World War II
• —Food and agriculture in Nazi Germany
• —Feeding Britain in the Second World War
• —Evacuations of civilians in the United Kingdom during the Second World War
• —Air raid shelter
• —War Refugee Board
• —Auxiliary Units
• —Soviet Union in World War II
• —British Empire in World War II
• —Japan during World War II
• —France during World War II
• —Military history of France during World War II
• —Military history of the United States during World War II
• —Military history of the Philippines during World War II
• —United States Army during World War II
• —India in World War II
• —Egypt in World War II
• —Latin America during World War II
• —Ceylon in World War II
• —Greenland in World War II
• —French Indochina in World War II
• —World War II in Albania
• —Mongolia in World War II
• —Vatican City during World War II
• —Antarctica during World War II
• —RAF Fighter Command
• —RAF Fighter Command order of battle 1940
• —Luftwaffe order of battle August 1940
• —Wehrmacht forces for the Ardennes Offensive
• —Operation Barbarossa order of battle
• —Panzer Army Africa
• —Fliegerführer Afrika
• —1st SS Infantry Brigade
• —SS Cavalry Brigade
• —1st Free French Division
• —Chindits
• —Force 136
• —Trans-Iranian Railway
• —Burma Road
• —Soviet industry in World War II
• —United States aircraft production during World War II
• —Nuremberg trials
• —Nuremberg Diary
• —Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories
• —Allied plans for German industry after World War II
• —Demobilization of United States Armed Forces after World War II
• —Finnish war reparations to the Soviet Union
• —Polish population transfers in 1944–1946
• —Tito–Stalin split
• —Prisoner of war
• —French prisoners of war in World War II
• —Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War
• —Germany–Soviet Union relations, 1918–1941
• —German–Soviet Axis talks
• —Gestapo–NKVD conferences
• —United Kingdom–United States relations in World War II
• —German–Japanese industrial co-operation before and during World War II
• —Liberation of France
• —Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1941))
• —Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1941–1945))
• —Churchill war ministry
• —Military career of Dwight D. Eisenhower
• —Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph

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