Semantic and Sentiment Dual-Enhanced Generative Model for Script Event Prediction

Feiyang Wu, Peixin Huang, Yanli Hu, Zhen Tan, Xiang Zhao


Abstract
Script Event Prediction (SEP) aims to forecast the next event in a sequence from a list of candidates. Traditional methods often use pre-trained language models to model event associations but struggle with semantic ambiguity and embedding bias. Semantic ambiguity arises from the multiple meanings of identical words and insufficient consideration of event arguments, while embedding bias results from assigning similar word embeddings to event pairs with similar lexical features, despite their different meanings. To address above issues, we propose a the Semantic and Sentiment Dual-enhanced Generative Model (SSD-GM). SSD-GM leverages two types of script event information to enhance the generative model. Specifically, it employs a GNN-based semantic structure aggregator to integrate the event-centric structure information, thereby mitigating the impact of semantic ambiguity. Furthermore, we find that local sentiment variability effectively reduces biases in event embeddings, while maintaining global sentiment consistency enhances predictive accuracy. As a result, SSD-GM adeptly captures both global and local sentiment of events through its sentiment information awareness mechanism. Extensive experiments on the Multi-Choice Narrative Cloze (MCNC) task demonstrate that our approach achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.622
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9250–9259
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.622/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Feiyang Wu, Peixin Huang, Yanli Hu, Zhen Tan, and Xiang Zhao. 2025. Semantic and Sentiment Dual-Enhanced Generative Model for Script Event Prediction. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9250–9259, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic and Sentiment Dual-Enhanced Generative Model for Script Event Prediction (Wu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.622.pdf