The aim of SemEval-2024 Task 1, “Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages” is to develop models for identifying semantic textual relatedness (STR) between two sentences using multiple languages (14 African and Asian languages) and settings (supervised, unsupervised, and cross-lingual). Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on several natural language understanding tasks such as multilingual machine translation (MMT), semantic similarity (STS), and encoding sentence embeddings. Using a combination of LLMs that perform well on these tasks, we developed two STR models, TranSem and FineSem, for the supervised and cross-lingual settings. We explore the effectiveness of several training methods and the usefulness of machine translation. We find that direct fine-tuning on the task is comparable to using sentence embeddings and translating to English leads to better performance for some languages. In the supervised setting, our model performance is better than the official baseline for 3 languages with the remaining 4 performing on par. In the cross-lingual setting, our model performance is better than the baseline for 3 languages (leading to 1st place for Africaans and 2nd place for Indonesian), is on par for 2 languages and performs poorly on the remaining 7 languages.

Interpreting and assessing goal driven actions is vital to understanding and reasoning over complex events. It is important to be able to acquire the knowledge needed for this understanding, though doing so is challenging. We argue that such knowledge can be elicited through a participant achievement lens. We analyze a complex event in a narrative according to the intended achievements of the participants in that narrative, the likely future actions of the participants, and the likelihood of goal success. We collect 6.3K high quality goal and action annotations reflecting our proposed participant achievement lens, with an average weighted Fleiss-Kappa IAA of 80%. Our collection contains annotated alternate versions of each narrative. These alternate versions vary minimally from the “original” story, but can license drastically different inferences. Our findings suggest that while modern large language models can reflect some of the goal-based knowledge we study, they find it challenging to fully capture the design and intent behind concerted actions, even when the model pretraining included the data from which we extracted the goal knowledge. We show that smaller models fine-tuned on our dataset can achieve performance surpassing larger models.

Schema induction involves creating a graph representation depicting how events unfold in a scenario. We present SAGEViz, an intuitive and modular tool that utilizes human-AI collaboration to create and update complex schema graphs efficiently, where multiple annotators (humans and models) can work simultaneously on a schema graph from any domain. The tool consists of two components: (1) a curation component powered by plug-and-play event language models to create and expand event sequences while human annotators validate and enrich the sequences to build complex hierarchical schemas, and (2) an easy-to-use visualization component to visualize schemas at varying levels of hierarchy. Using supervised and few-shot approaches, our event language models can continually predict relevant events starting from a seed event. We conduct a user study and show that users need less effort in terms of interaction steps with SAGEViz to generate schemas of better quality. We also include a video demonstrating the system.

Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire.We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowdworkers are ableto (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that make up the situation, (2) annotate the volitional engagement of participants in causing the situation, and (3) ground theoutcome of the situation in state changes of the participants. By creating a multi-step interface and a careful quality control strategy, we collect a high quality annotated dataset of8K short newswire narratives and ROCStories with high inter-annotator agreement (0.74-0.96weighted Fleiss Kappa). Our dataset, POQUe (Participant Outcome Questions), enables theexploration and development of models that address multiple aspects of semantic understanding. Experimentally, we show that current language models lag behind human performance in subtle ways through our task formulations that target abstract and specific comprehension of a complex event, its outcome, and a participant’s influence over the event culmination.