EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs

Cheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Chunkit Chan, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Zhang


Abstract
Narrative reasoning relies on the understanding of eventualities in story contexts, which requires a wealth of background world knowledge. To help machines leverage such knowledge, existing solutions can be categorized into two groups. Some focus on implicitly modeling eventuality knowledge by pretraining language models (LMs) with eventuality-aware objectives. However, this approach breaks down knowledge structures and lacks interpretability. Others explicitly collect world knowledge of eventualities into structured eventuality-centric knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing research on leveraging these knowledge sources for free-texts is limited. In this work, we propose an initial comprehensive framework called EventGround, which aims to tackle the problem of grounding free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for contextualized narrative reasoning. We identify two critical problems in this direction: the event representation and sparsity problems. We provide simple yet effective parsing and partial information extraction methods to tackle these problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline models when combined with graph neural network (GNN) or large language model (LLM) based graph reasoning models. Our framework, incorporating grounded knowledge, achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing interpretable evidence.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.587
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:
6622–6642
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.587
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Chunkit Chan, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, and Zheng Zhang. 2024. EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6622–6642, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs (Jiayang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.587.pdf