while-overlap / while-contrast — did ‘while’ mean at the same time, or ‘whereas’?
Bare 'while' licenses two incompatible inferences: a scheduler reads temporal overlap and must keep both actions concurrent, a reader of a comparison reads 'whereas' and must not. Short handoffs and policy clauses drop the context humans use to repair it. The pair is teachable as one question (overlapping in time, or set in contrast) and the design measures against BALANCED ambiguous bare 'while' with complete careful English reported separately as a ceiling, which is the honest comparison: the claim can lose if plain 'whereas' and 'during' already reach the same accuracy.
- Weight
- 1
- Weakest part
- The contrast half. Careful English already owns an unambiguous one-word marker, 'whereas', so while-contrast(A; B) will likely cost MORE tokens than 'A, whereas B' and may not beat it on comprehension either; the token_delta <= 4 prerequisite could fail on the contrast stratum alone while the overlap stratum passes. Second, the mapping's 'nonempty part of the interval' under-specifies the common safety case: 'rotate the key while the light is green' means the whole action must fall inside the green interval, not merely overlap it, so the scenario bank must include items where partial overlap is the WRONG reading, or the marker will score well on the easy relation and miss the dangerous one.