What Makes the Story Forward?: Inferring Commonsense Explanations as Prompts for Future Event Generation

Lifu Huang

Abstract

Prediction over event sequences is critical for many real-world applications in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. Future Event Generation (FEG) is a challenging task in event sequence prediction because it requires not only fluent text generation but also commonsense reasoning to maintain the logical coherence of the entire event story. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable FEG framework, Coep. It highlights and integrates two types of event knowledge, sequential knowledge of direct event-event relations and inferential knowledge that reflects the intermediate character psychology between events, such as intents, causes, reactions, which intrinsically pushes the story forward. To alleviate the knowledge forgetting issue, we design two modules, IM and GM, for each type of knowledge, which are combined via prompt tuning. First, IM focuses on understanding inferential knowledge to generate commonsense explanations and provide a soft prompt vector for GM. We also design a contrastive discriminator for better generalization ability. Second, GM generates future events by modeling direct sequential knowledge with the guidance of IM. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can generate more coherent, specific, and logical future events.

Li Lin, Yixin Cao, Lifu Huang, Shuang Li, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Jianmin Wang: What Makes the Story Forward?: Inferring Commonsense Explanations as Prompts for Future Event Generation. SIGIR 2022: 1098-1109