Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation
Lianhui Qin, Antoine Bosselut, Ari Holtzman, Chandra Bhagavatula, Elizabeth Clark, Yejin Choi
Abstract
Counterfactual reasoning requires predicting how alternative events, contrary to what actually happened, might have resulted in different outcomes. Despite being considered a necessary component of AI-complete systems, few resources have been developed for evaluating counterfactual reasoning in narratives. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Story Rewriting: given an original story and an intervening counterfactual event, the task is to minimally revise the story to make it compatible with the given counterfactual event. Solving this task will require deep understanding of causal narrative chains and counterfactual invariance, and integration of such story reasoning capabilities into conditional language generation models. We present TIMETRAVEL, a new dataset of 29,849 counterfactual rewritings, each with the original story, a counterfactual event, and human-generated revision of the original story compatible with the counterfactual event. Additionally, we include 81,407 counterfactual “branches” without a rewritten storyline to support future work on semi- or un-supervised approaches to counterfactual story rewriting. Finally, we evaluate the counterfactual rewriting capacities of several competitive baselines based on pretrained language models, and assess whether common overlap and model-based automatic metrics for text generation correlate well with human scores for counterfactual rewriting.- Anthology ID:
- D19-1509
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Hong Kong, China
- Venues:
- EMNLP | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5043–5053
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D19-1509
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D19-1509
- Cite (ACL):
- Lianhui Qin, Antoine Bosselut, Ari Holtzman, Chandra Bhagavatula, Elizabeth Clark, and Yejin Choi. 2019. Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5043–5053, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generation (Qin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/D19-1509.pdf
- Code
- qkaren/Counterfactual-StoryRW
- Data
- TimeTravel, Story Cloze