Abstract: Prior work has proposed effective methods to learn event representations that can capture syntactic and semantic information over text corpus, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream tasks such as script event prediction. On the other hand, events extracted from raw texts lacks of commonsense knowledge, such as the intents and emotions of the event participants, which are useful for distinguishing event pairs when there are only subtle differences in their surface realizations. To address this issue, this paper proposes to leverage external commonsense knowledge about the intent and sentiment of the event. Experiments on three event-related tasks, i.e., event similarity, script event prediction and stock market prediction, show that our model obtains much better event embeddings for the tasks, achieving 78% improvements on hard similarity task, yielding more precise inferences on subsequent events under given contexts, and better accuracies in predicting the volatilities of the stock market.

Introduction: Events are a kind of important objective information of the world. Structuralizing and representing such information as machine-readable knowledge are crucial to artificial intelligence BIBREF0, BIBREF1. The main idea is to learn distributed representations for structured events (i.e. event embeddings) from text, and use them as the basis to induce textual features for downstream applications, such as script event prediction and stock market prediction. Parameterized additive models are among the most widely used for learning distributed event representations in prior work BIBREF2, BIBREF3, which passes the concatenation or addition of event arguments' word embeddings to a parameterized function. The function maps the summed vectors into an event embedding space. Furthermore, BIBREF4 ding2015deep and BIBREF5 weber2018event propose using neural tensor networks to perform semantic composition of event arguments, which can better capture the interactions between event arguments. This line of work only captures shallow event semantics, which is not capable of distinguishing events with subtle differences. On the one hand, the obtained event embeddings cannot capture the relationship between events that are syntactically or semantically similar, if they do not share similar word vectors. For example, as shown in Figure FIGREF2 (a), “PersonX threw bomb” and “PersonZ attacked embassy”. On the other hand, two events with similar word embeddings may have similar embeddings despite that they are quite unrelated, for example, as shown in Figure FIGREF2 (b), “PersonX broke record” and “PersonY broke vase”. Note that in this paper, similar events generally refer to events with strong semantic relationships rather than just the same events. One important reason for the problem is the lack of the external commonsense knowledge about the mental state of event participants when learning the objective event representations. In Figure FIGREF2 (a), two event participants “PersonY” and “PersonZ” may carry out a terrorist attack, and hence, they have the same intent: “to bloodshed”, which can help representation learning model maps two events into the neighbor vector space. In Figure FIGREF2 (b), a change to a single argument leads to a large semantic shift in the event representations, as the change of an argument can result in different emotions of event participants. Who “broke the record” is likely to be happy, while, who “broke a vase” may be sad. Hence, intent and sentiment can be used to learn more fine-grained semantic features for event embeddings. Such commonsense knowledge is not explicitly expressed but can be found in a knowledge base such as Event2Mind BIBREF6 and ATOMIC BIBREF7. Thus, we aim to incorporate the external commonsense knowledge, i.e., intent and sentiment, into the learning process to generate better event representations. Specifically, we propose a simple and effective model to jointly embed events, intents and emotions into the same vector space. A neural tensor network is used to learn baseline event embeddings, and we define a corresponding loss function to incorporate intent and sentiment information. Extensive experiments show that incorporating external commonsense knowledge brings promising improvements to event embeddings, achieving 78% and 200% improvements on hard similarity small and big dataset, respectively. With better embeddings, we can achieve superior performances on script event prediction and stock market prediction compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Question: How is the event prediction task evaluated?
Answer: replacing the event embeddings on SGNN and running it on the MCNC dataset