Event Representation with Sequential, Semi-Supervised Discrete Variables

Mehdi Rezaee, Francis Ferraro


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.374
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4701–4716
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.374
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.374
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mehdi Rezaee and Francis Ferraro. 2021. Event Representation with Sequential, Semi-Supervised Discrete Variables. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4701–4716, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Event Representation with Sequential, Semi-Supervised Discrete Variables (Rezaee & Ferraro, NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.374.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.374.mp4