EIGEN: Event Influence GENeration using Pre-trained Language Models
This work addresses the need for better event reasoning in natural language processing, particularly for tasks requiring background knowledge and multi-hop inference, though it is incremental as it builds on existing language models.
The paper tackles the problem of generating event influences by introducing EIGEN, a method that uses pre-trained language models to condition on context, influence nature, and reasoning chain distance, resulting in a 10-point ROUGE improvement over baselines and a 3% F1 boost on a 'what-if' QA benchmark.
Reasoning about events and tracking their influences is fundamental to understanding processes. In this paper, we present EIGEN - a method to leverage pre-trained language models to generate event influences conditioned on a context, nature of their influence, and the distance in a reasoning chain. We also derive a new dataset for research and evaluation of methods for event influence generation. EIGEN outperforms strong baselines both in terms of automated evaluation metrics (by 10 ROUGE points) and human judgments on closeness to reference and relevance of generations. Furthermore, we show that the event influences generated by EIGEN improve the performance on a "what-if" Question Answering (WIQA) benchmark (over 3% F1), especially for questions that require background knowledge and multi-hop reasoning.