DocScript: Document-level Script Event Prediction

Puneet Mathur, Vlad I. Morariu, Aparna Garimella, Franck Dernoncourt, Jiuxiang Gu, Ramit Sawhney, Preslav Nakov, Dinesh Manocha, Rajiv Jain


Abstract
We present a novel task of document-level script event prediction, which aims to predict the next event given a candidate list of narrative events in long-form documents. To enable this, we introduce DocSEP, a challenging dataset in two new domains - contractual documents and Wikipedia articles, where timeline events may be paragraphs apart and may require multi-hop temporal and causal reasoning. We benchmark existing baselines and present a novel architecture called DocScript to learn sequential ordering between events at the document scale. Our experimental results on the DocSEP dataset demonstrate that learning longer-range dependencies between events is a key challenge and show that contemporary LLMs such as ChatGPT and FlanT5 struggle to solve this task, indicating their lack of reasoning abilities for understanding causal relationships and temporal sequences within long texts.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.458
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
5140–5155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.458
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Puneet Mathur, Vlad I. Morariu, Aparna Garimella, Franck Dernoncourt, Jiuxiang Gu, Ramit Sawhney, Preslav Nakov, Dinesh Manocha, and Rajiv Jain. 2024. DocScript: Document-level Script Event Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5140–5155, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
DocScript: Document-level Script Event Prediction (Mathur et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.458.pdf