Question: Do the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) support robust inference and effective learning algorithms?
Evidence:  Scripts were developed as a means of representing stereotypical event sequences and interactions in narratives. The benefits of scripts for encoding common sense knowledge, filling in gaps in a story, resolving ambiguous references, and answering comprehension questions have been amply demonstrated in the early work in natural language understanding BIBREF0 . The earliest attempts to learn scripts were based on explanation-based learning, which can be characterized as example-guided deduction from first principles BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . While this approach is successful in generalizing from a small number of examples, it requires a strong domain theory, which limits its applicability.
More recently, some new graph-based algorithms for inducing script-like structures from text have emerged. “Narrative Chains” is a narrative model similar to Scripts BIBREF3 . Each Narrative Chain is a directed graph indicating the most frequent temporal relationship between the events in the chain. Narrative Chains are learned by a novel application of pairwise mutual information and temporal relation learning. Another graph learning approach employs Multiple Sequence Alignment in conjunction with a semantic similarity function to cluster sequences of event descriptions into a directed graph BIBREF4 . More recently still, graphical models have been proposed for representing script-like knowledge, but these lack the temporal component that is central to this paper and to the early script work. These models instead focus on learning bags of related events BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 .
While the above approches demonstrate the learnability of script-like knowledge, they do not offer a probabilistic framework to reason robustly under uncertainty taking into account the temporal order of events. In this paper we present the first formal representation of scripts as Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), which support robust inference and effective learning algorithms. The states of the HMM correspond to event types in scripts, such as entering a restaurant or opening a door. Observations correspond to natural language sentences that describe the event instances that occur in the story, e.g., “John went to Starbucks. He came back after ten minutes.” The standard inference algorithms, such as the Forward-Backward algorithm, are able to answer questions about the hidden states given the observed sentences, for example, “What did John do in Starbucks?”
There are two complications that need to be dealt with to adapt HMMs to model narrative scripts. First, both the set of states, i.e., event types, and the set of observations are not pre-specified but are to be learned from data. We assume that the set of possible observations and the set of event types to be bounded but unknown. We employ the clustering algorithm proposed in BIBREF4 to reduce the natural language sentences, i.e., event descriptions, to a small set of observations and states based on their Wordnet similarity.
The second complication of narrative texts is that many events may be omitted either in the narration or by the event extraction process. More importantly, there is no indication of a time lapse or a gap in the story, so the standard forward-backward algorithm does not apply. To account for this, we allow the states to skip generating observations with some probability. This kind of HMMs, with insertions and gaps, have been considered previously in speech processing BIBREF7 and in computational biology BIBREF8 . We refine these models by allowing state-dependent missingness, without introducing additional “insert states” or “delete states” as in BIBREF8 . In this paper, we restrict our attention to the so-called “Left-to-Right HMMs” which have acyclic graphical structure with possible self-loops, as they support more efficient inference algorithms than general HMMs and suffice to model most of the natural scripts. We consider the problem of learning the structure and parameters of scripts in the form of HMMs from sequences of natural language sentences. Our solution to script learning is a novel bottom-up method for structure learning, called SEM-HMM, which is inspired by Bayesian Model Merging (BMM) BIBREF9 and Structural Expectation Maximization (SEM) BIBREF10 . It starts with a fully enumerated HMM representation of the event sequences and incrementally merges states and deletes edges to improve the posterior probability of the structure and the parameters given the data. We compare our approach to several informed baselines on many natural datasets and show its superior performance. We believe our work represents the first formalization of scripts that supports probabilistic inference, and paves the way for robust understanding of natural language texts.
In this paper we present the first formal representation of scripts as Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), which support robust inference and effective learning algorithms.
Answer: Yes, they are.