Abstract This paper focuses on the investigations in Winograd Schema (WS), a challenging problem which has been proposed for measuring progress in commonsense reasoning. Due to the lack of commonsense knowledge and training data, very little work has been reported on the WS problems. This paper addresses a set of WS problems by proposing a knowledge acquisition method and a general neural association model. To avoid the sparseness issue, the knowledge we aim to collect is the cause-effect relationships between a collection of commonly used words. The knowledge acquisition method supports us to extract hundreds of thousands of cause-effect pairs from text corpora automatically. Meanwhile, a neural association model (NAM) is proposed to encode the association relationships between any two discrete events. Based on the extracted knowledge and the NAM models, we successfully build a system for solving a causal subset of WS problems from scratch and achieve 70% accuracy. Most importantly, this paper provides a flexible framework to solve WS problems based on event association and neural network methods.