Inferring Commonsense Explanations as Prompts for Future Event Generation

Future Event Generation aims to generate fluent and reasonable future event descriptions given preceding events. It requires not only fluent text generation but also commonsense reasoning to maintain the coherence of the entire event story. However, existing FEG methods are easily trapped into repeated or general events without imposing any logical constraint to the generation process. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable FEG framework that consists of a commonsense inference model (IM) and an event generation model (GM). The IM, which is pre-trained on a commonsense knowledge graph ATOMIC, learns to interpret the preceding events and conducts commonsense reasoning to reveal the characters psychology such as intent, reaction, and needs as latent variables. GM further takes the commonsense knowledge as prompts to guide and enforce the generation of logistically coherent future events. As unique merit, the commonsense prompts can be further decoded into textual descriptions, yielding explanations for the future event. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can generate more coherent, specific, and logical future events than the strong baselines.