@inproceedings{rezaee-ferraro-2021-event,
    title = "Event Representation with Sequential, Semi-Supervised Discrete Variables",
    author = "Rezaee, Mehdi  and
      Ferraro, Francis",
    editor = "Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Rumshisky, Anna  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Beltagy, Iz  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Zhou, Yichao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.naacl-main.374/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.374",
    pages = "4701--4716",
    abstract = "Within the context of event modeling and understanding, we propose a new method for neural sequence modeling that takes partially-observed sequences of discrete, external knowledge into account. We construct a sequential neural variational autoencoder, which uses Gumbel-Softmax reparametrization within a carefully defined encoder, to allow for successful backpropagation during training. The core idea is to allow semi-supervised external discrete knowledge to guide, but not restrict, the variational latent parameters during training. Our experiments indicate that our approach not only outperforms multiple baselines and the state-of-the-art in narrative script induction, but also converges more quickly."
}