COMET-M: Reasoning about Multiple Events in Complex Sentences

Sahithya Ravi, Raymond Ng, Vered Shwartz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Understanding the speaker's intended meaning often involves drawing commonsense inferences to reason about what is not stated explicitly. In multi-event sentences, it requires understanding the relationships between events based on contextual knowledge. We propose COMET-M (Multi-Event), an event-centric commonsense model capable of generating commonsense inferences for a target event within a complex sentence. COMET-M builds upon COMET (Bosselut et al., 2019), which excels at generating event-centric inferences for simple sentences, but struggles with the complexity of multi-event sentences prevalent in natural text. To overcome this limitation, we curate a Multi-Event Inference (MEI) dataset of 35K human-written inferences. We train COMET-M on the human-written inferences and also create baselines using automatically labeled examples. Experimental results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of COMET-M over COMET in generating multi-event inferences. Moreover, COMET-M successfully produces distinct inferences for each target event, taking the complete context into consideration. COMET-M holds promise for downstream tasks involving natural text such as coreference resolution, dialogue, and story understanding.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages12921-12937
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760615
StatePublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period6/12/2310/12/23

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Funding

This work was funded, in part, by the Vector Institute for AI, Canada CIFAR AI Chairs program, an NSERC discovery grant, and a research gift from AI2.

FundersFunder number
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Vector Institute

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