Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning

Li Du, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, Bing Qin


Abstract
Abductive reasoning aims at inferring the most plausible explanation for observed events, which would play critical roles in various NLP applications, such as reading comprehension and question answering. To facilitate this task, a narrative text based abductive reasoning task 𝛼NLI is proposed, together with explorations about building reasoning framework using pretrained language models. However, abundant event commonsense knowledge is not well exploited for this task. To fill this gap, we propose a variational autoencoder based model ege-RoBERTa, which employs a latent variable to capture the necessary commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. Experimental results show that through learning the external event graph knowledge, our approach outperforms the baseline methods on the 𝛼NLI task.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.403
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5181–5190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.403
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.403
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Li Du, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, and Bing Qin. 2021. Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5181–5190, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning (Du et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.403.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-long.403.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.403.mp4
Code
 sjcfr/ege-roberta
Data
TimeTravelVIST