Mehdi Rezaee


2021

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Event Representation with Sequential, Semi-Supervised Discrete Variables
Mehdi Rezaee | Francis Ferraro
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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.
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