We describe an unsupervised system for learning narrative schemas, coherent sequences or sets of events (arrested(POLICE,SUSPECT), convicted( JUDGE, SUSPECT)) whose arguments are filled with participant semantic roles defined over words (JUDGE = {judge, jury, court}, POLICE = {police, agent, authorities}). Unlike most previous work in event structure or semantic role learning, our system does not use supervised techniques, hand-built knowledge, or predefined classes of events or roles. Our unsupervised learning algorithm uses coreferring arguments in chains of verbs to learn both rich narrative event structure and argument roles. By jointly addressing both tasks, we improve on previous results in narrative/frame learning and induce rich frame-specific semantic roles.

Representation and learning of commonsense knowledge is one of the foundational problems in the quest to enable deep language understanding. This issue is particularly challenging for understanding casual and correlational relationships between events. While this topic has received a lot of interest in the NLP community, research has been hindered by the lack of a proper evaluation framework. This paper attempts to address this problem with a new framework for evaluating story understanding and script learning: the 'Story Cloze Test'. This test requires a system to choose the correct ending to a four-sentence story. We created a new corpus of 50k five-sentence commonsense stories, ROCStories, to enable this evaluation. This corpus is unique in two ways: (1) it captures a rich set of causal and temporal commonsense relations between daily events, and (2) it is a high quality collection of everyday life stories that can also be used for story generation. Experimental evaluation shows that a host of baselines and state-of-the-art models based on shallow language understanding struggle to achieve a high score on the Story Cloze Test. We discuss these implications for script and story learning, and offer suggestions for deeper language understanding.

We propose a new deterministic approach to coreference resolution that combines the global information and precise features of modern machine-learning models with the transparency and modularity of deterministic, rule-based systems. Our sieve architecture applies a battery of deterministic coreference models one at a time from highest to lowest precision, where each model builds on the previous model's cluster output. The two stages of our sieve-based architecture, a mention detection stage that heavily favors recall, followed by coreference sieves that are precision-oriented, offer a powerful way to achieve both high precision and high recall. Further, our approach makes use of global information through an entity-centric model that encourages the sharing of features across all mentions that point to the same real-world entity. Despite its simplicity, our approach gives state-of-the-art performance on several corpora and genres, and has also been incorporated into hybrid state-of-the-art coreference systems for Chinese and Arabic. Our system thus offers a new paradigm for combining knowledge in rule-based systems that has implications throughout computational linguistics.

The LSDSem'17 shared task is the Story Cloze Test, a new evaluation for story understanding and script learning. This test provides a system with a four-sentence story and two possible endings, and the system must choose the correct ending to the story. Successful narrative understanding (getting closer to human performance of 100%) requires systems to link various levels of semantics to commonsense knowledge. A total of eight systems participated in the shared task, with a variety of approaches including end-to-end neural networks, feature-based regression models, and rule-based methods. The highest performing system achieves an accuracy of 75.2%, a substantial improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

This paper describes a fully automatic twostage machine learning architecture that learns temporal relations between pairs of events. The first stage learns the temporal attributes of single event descriptions, such as tense, grammatical aspect, and aspectual class. These imperfect guesses, combined with other linguistic features, are then used in a second stage to classify the temporal relationship between two events. We present both an analysis of our new features and results on the TimeBank Corpus that is 3% higher than previous work that used perfect human tagged features.