COMET-M: Reasoning about Multiple Events in Complex Sentences
This work addresses a bottleneck in natural language understanding for tasks like coreference resolution and dialogue, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing model.
The paper tackles the problem of generating commonsense inferences for multiple events in complex sentences, achieving significant performance improvement over the baseline COMET model.
Understanding the speaker's intended meaning often involves drawing commonsense inferences to reason about what is not stated explicitly. In multi-event sentences, it requires understanding the relationships between events based on contextual knowledge. We propose COMET-M (Multi-Event), an event-centric commonsense model capable of generating commonsense inferences for a target event within a complex sentence. COMET-M builds upon COMET (Bosselut et al., 2019), which excels at generating event-centric inferences for simple sentences, but struggles with the complexity of multi-event sentences prevalent in natural text. To overcome this limitation, we curate a multi-event inference dataset of 35K human-written inferences. We trained COMET-M on the human-written inferences and also created baselines using automatically labeled examples. Experimental results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of COMET-M over COMET in generating multi-event inferences. Moreover, COMET-M successfully produces distinct inferences for each target event, taking the complete context into consideration. COMET-M holds promise for downstream tasks involving natural text such as coreference resolution, dialogue, and story understanding.