Manfred Pinkal

Lilian D. A. Wanzare, Michael Roth, Manfred Pinkal

Script knowledge consists of detailed information on everyday activities. Such information is often taken for granted in text and needs to be inferred by readers. Therefore, script knowledge is a central component to language comprehension. Previous work on representing scripts is mostly based on extensive manual work or limited to scenarios that can be found with sufficient redundancy in large corpora. We introduce the task of scenario detection, in which we identify references to scripts. In this task, we address a wide range of different scripts (200 scenarios) and we attempt to identify all references to them in a collection of narrative texts. We present a first benchmark data set and a baseline model that tackles scenario detection using techniques from topic segmentation and text classification.

Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, Manfred Pinkal

We introduce MCScript2.0, a machine comprehension corpus for the end-to-end evaluation of script knowledge. MCScript2.0 contains approx. 20,000 questions on approx. 3,500 texts, crowdsourced based on a new collection process that results in challenging questions. Half of the questions cannot be answered from the reading texts, but require the use of commonsense and, in particular, script knowledge. We give a thorough analysis of our corpus and show that while the task is not challenging to humans, existing machine comprehension models fail to perform well on the data, even if they make use of a commonsense knowledge base. The dataset is available at http://www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/?page_id=2582

Simon Ostermann, Ashutosh Modi, Michael Roth et al.

We introduce a large dataset of narrative texts and questions about these texts, intended to be used in a machine comprehension task that requires reasoning using commonsense knowledge. Our dataset complements similar datasets in that we focus on stories about everyday activities, such as going to the movies or working in the garden, and that the questions require commonsense knowledge, or more specifically, script knowledge, to be answered. We show that our mode of data collection via crowdsourcing results in a substantial amount of such inference questions. The dataset forms the basis of a shared task on commonsense and script knowledge organized at SemEval 2018 and provides challenging test cases for the broader natural language understanding community.

Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, Stefan Thater et al.

Script knowledge plays a central role in text understanding and is relevant for a variety of downstream tasks. In this paper, we consider two recent datasets which provide a rich and general representation of script events in terms of paraphrase sets. We introduce the task of mapping event mentions in narrative texts to such script event types, and present a model for this task that exploits rich linguistic representations as well as information on temporal ordering. The results of our experiments demonstrate that this complex task is indeed feasible.

Dai Quoc Nguyen, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Cuong Xuan Chu et al.

This paper presents an approach to the task of predicting an event description from a preceding sentence in a text. Our approach explores sequence-to-sequence learning using a bidirectional multi-layer recurrent neural network. Our approach substantially outperforms previous work in terms of the BLEU score on two datasets derived from WikiHow and DeScript respectively. Since the BLEU score is not easy to interpret as a measure of event prediction, we complement our study with a second evaluation that exploits the rich linguistic annotation of gold paraphrase sets of events.

Ashutosh Modi, Tatjana Anikina, Simon Ostermann et al.

This paper presents the InScript corpus (Narrative Texts Instantiating Script structure). InScript is a corpus of 1,000 stories centered around 10 different scenarios. Verbs and noun phrases are annotated with event and participant types, respectively. Additionally, the text is annotated with coreference information. The corpus shows rich lexical variation and will serve as a unique resource for the study of the role of script knowledge in natural language processing.

Ashutosh Modi, Ivan Titov, Vera Demberg et al.

Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the factors that affect human prediction by building a computational model that can predict upcoming discourse referents based on linguistic knowledge alone vs. linguistic knowledge jointly with common-sense knowledge in the form of scripts. We find that script knowledge significantly improves model estimates of human predictions. In a second study, we test the highly controversial hypothesis that predictability influences referring expression type but do not find evidence for such an effect.

Anna Senina, Marcus Rohrbach, Wei Qiu et al.

Humans can easily describe what they see in a coherent way and at varying level of detail. However, existing approaches for automatic video description are mainly focused on single sentence generation and produce descriptions at a fixed level of detail. In this paper, we address both of these limitations: for a variable level of detail we produce coherent multi-sentence descriptions of complex videos. We follow a two-step approach where we first learn to predict a semantic representation (SR) from video and then generate natural language descriptions from the SR. To produce consistent multi-sentence descriptions, we model across-sentence consistency at the level of the SR by enforcing a consistent topic. We also contribute both to the visual recognition of objects proposing a hand-centric approach as well as to the robust generation of sentences using a word lattice. Human judges rate our multi-sentence descriptions as more readable, correct, and relevant than related work. To understand the difference between more detailed and shorter descriptions, we collect and analyze a video description corpus of three levels of detail.