Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding

Jongho Kim, Dohyeon Lee, Minsoo Kim, Seung-won Hwang


Abstract
Accurately understanding temporal relations between events is a critical building block of diverse tasks, such as temporal reading comprehension (TRC) and relation extraction (TRE). For example in TRC, we need to understand the temporal semantic differences between the following two questions that are lexically near-identical: “What finished right before the decision?” or “What finished right after the decision?”. To discern the two questions, existing solutions have relied on answer overlaps as a proxy label to contrast similar and dissimilar questions. However, we claim that answer overlap can lead to unreliable results, due to spurious overlaps of two dissimilar questions with coincidentally identical answers. To address the issue, we propose a novel approach that elicits proper reasoning behaviors through a module for predicting time spans of events. We introduce the Timeline Reasoning Network (TRN) operating in a two-step inductive reasoning process: In the first step model initially answers each question with semantic and syntactic information. The next step chains multiple questions on the same event to predict a timeline, which is then used to ground the answers. Results on the TORQUE and TB-dense, TRC, and TRE tasks respectively, demonstrate that TRN outperforms previous methods by effectively resolving the spurious overlaps using the predicted timeline.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.101
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1689–1700
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.101
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jongho Kim, Dohyeon Lee, Minsoo Kim, and Seung-won Hwang. 2024. Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1689–1700, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding (Kim et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.101.pdf