Abstract
Understanding the speaker’s intended meaning often involves drawing commonsense inferences to reason about what is not stated explicitly. In multi-event sentences, it requires understanding the relationships between events based on contextual knowledge. We propose COMET-M (Multi-Event), an event-centric commonsense model capable of generating commonsense inferences for a target event within a complex sentence. COMET-M builds upon COMET (Bosselut et al., 2019), which excels at generating event-centric inferences for simple sentences, but struggles with the complexity of multi-event sentences prevalent in natural text. To overcome this limitation, we curate a Multi-Event Inference (MEI) dataset of 35K human-written inferences. We train COMET-M on the human-written inferences and also create baselines using automatically labeled examples. Experimental results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of COMET-M over COMET in generating multi-event inferences. Moreover, COMET-M successfully produces distinct inferences for each target event, taking the complete context into consideration. COMET-M holds promise for downstream tasks involving natural text such as coreference resolution, dialogue, and story understanding.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.861
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 12921–12937
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.861
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.861
- Cite (ACL):
- Sahithya Ravi, Raymond Ng, and Vered Shwartz. 2023. COMET-M: Reasoning about Multiple Events in Complex Sentences. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12921–12937, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- COMET-M: Reasoning about Multiple Events in Complex Sentences (Ravi et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2023.findings-emnlp.861.pdf