Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation

Yu Feng, Ben Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Helen Jin, Dan Roth

Abstract
Temporal reasoning is the task of predicting temporal relations of event pairs. While temporal reasoning models can perform reasonably well on in-domain benchmarks, we have little idea of these systems’ generalizability due to existing datasets’ limitations. In this work, we introduce a novel task named TODAY that bridges this gap with temporal differential analysis, which as the name suggests, evaluates whether systems can correctly understand the effect of incremental changes. Specifically, TODAY introduces slight contextual changes for given event pairs, and systems are asked to tell how this subtle contextual change would affect relevant temporal relation distributions. To facilitate learning, TODAY also annotates human explanations. We show that existing models, including GPT-3.5, drop to random guessing on TODAY, suggesting that they heavily rely on spurious information rather than proper reasoning for temporal predictions. On the other hand, we show that TODAY’s supervision style and explanation annotations can be used in joint learning, encouraging models to use more appropriate signals during training and thus outperform across several benchmarks. TODAY can also be used to train models to solicit incidental supervision from noisy sources such as GPT-3.5, thus moving us more toward the goal of generic temporal reasoning systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.671
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12013–12029
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.671
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.671
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Feng, Ben Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Helen Jin, and Dan Roth. 2023. Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12013–12029, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation (Feng et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.acl-long.671.pdf
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