Narrative reasoning relies on the understanding of eventualities in story contexts, which requires a wealth of background world knowledge. To help machines leverage such knowledge, existing solutions can be categorized into two groups. Some focus on implicitly modeling eventuality knowledge by pretraining language models (LMs) with eventuality-aware objectives. However, this approach breaks down knowledge structures and lacks interpretability. Others explicitly collect world knowledge of eventualities into structured eventuality-centric knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing research on leveraging these knowledge sources for free-texts is limited. In this work, we propose an initial comprehensive framework called EventGround, which aims to tackle the problem of grounding free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for contextualized narrative reasoning. We identify two critical problems in this direction: the event representation and sparsity problems. We provide simple yet effective parsing and partial information extraction methods to tackle these problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline models when combined with graph neural network (GNN) or large language model (LLM) based graph reasoning models. Our framework, incorporating grounded knowledge, achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing interpretable evidence.

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT’s promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is a sophisticated and challenging task to recognize the discourse relations between the arguments with the absence of discourse connectives. The sense labels for each discourse relation follow a hierarchical classification scheme in the annotation process (Prasad et al., 2008), forming a hierarchy structure. Most existing works do not well incorporate the hierarchy structure but focus on the syntax features and the prior knowledge of connectives in the manner of pure text classification. We argue that it is more effective to predict the paths inside the hierarchical tree (e.g., “Comparison -> Contrast -> however”) rather than flat labels (e.g., Contrast) or connectives (e.g., however). We propose a prompt-based path prediction method to utilize the interactive information and intrinsic senses among the hierarchy in IDRR. This is the first work that injects such structure information into pre-trained language models via prompt tuning, and the performance of our solution shows significant and consistent improvement against competitive baselines.

The practice of transferring knowledge from a sophisticated, proprietary large language model (LLM) to a compact, open-source LLM has garnered considerable attention. Previous works have focused on a unidirectional knowledge distillation way by aligning the responses of the student model with those of the teacher model to a set of instructions. Nevertheless, they overlooked the possibility of incorporating any “feedback”–identifying challenging instructions where the student model’s performance falls short–to boost the student model’s proficiency iteratively. To this end, we propose a novel adversarial distillation framework for a more efficient knowledge transfer. Leveraging the versatile role adaptability of LLMs, we prompt the teacher model to identify “hard” instructions and generate new “hard” instructions for the student model, creating a three-stage adversarial loop of imitation, discrimination, and generation. By applying this adversarial framework, we successfully transfer knowledge from ChatGPT to a student model (named Lion), using a mere 70k training data. Our results show that Lion-13B not only achieves comparable open-ended generation capabilities to ChatGPT but surpasses conventional state-of-the-art (SOTA) instruction-tuned models like Vicuna-13B by 55.4% in challenging zero-shot reasoning benchmarks such as BIG-Bench Hard (BBH) and 16.7% on AGIEval.

Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, StoryAnalogy, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. We design a set of tests on StoryAnalogy, presenting the first evaluation of story-level analogy identification and generation. Interestingly, we find that the analogy identification tasks are incredibly difficult not only for sentence embedding models but also for the recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMa. ChatGPT, for example, only achieved around 30% accuracy in multiple-choice questions (compared to over 85% accuracy for humans). Furthermore, we observe that the data in StoryAnalogy can improve the quality of analogy generation in LLMs, where a fine-tuned FlanT5-xxl model achieves comparable performance to zero-shot ChatGPT.