Analogous Process Structure Induction for Sub-event Sequence Prediction
This addresses the need for abstraction in event understanding for NLP applications, offering a domain-specific improvement over ground-level methods.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting sub-event sequences for unseen processes by leveraging analogies and conceptualization, resulting in a framework that generates meaningful sequences and helps predict missing events.
Computational and cognitive studies of event understanding suggest that identifying, comprehending, and predicting events depend on having structured representations of a sequence of events and on conceptualizing (abstracting) its components into (soft) event categories. Thus, knowledge about a known process such as "buying a car" can be used in the context of a new but analogous process such as "buying a house". Nevertheless, most event understanding work in NLP is still at the ground level and does not consider abstraction. In this paper, we propose an Analogous Process Structure Induction APSI framework, which leverages analogies among processes and conceptualization of sub-event instances to predict the whole sub-event sequence of previously unseen open-domain processes. As our experiments and analysis indicate, APSI supports the generation of meaningful sub-event sequences for unseen processes and can help predict missing events.