Statistical Script Learning with Recurrent Neural Nets

Statistical Scripts are probabilistic models of sequences of events. For example, a script model might encode the information that the event “Smith met with the President” should strongly predict the event “Smith spoke to the President.” We present a number of results improving the state of the art of learning statistical scripts for inferring implicit events. First, we demonstrate that incorporating multiple arguments into events, yielding a more complex event representation than is used in previous work, helps to improve a co-occurrence-based script system’s predictive power. Second, we improve on these results with a Recurrent Neural Network script sequence model which uses a Long Short-Term Memory component. We evaluate in two ways: first, we evaluate systems’ ability to infer held-out events from documents (the “Narrative Cloze” evaluation); second, we evaluate novel event inferences by collecting human judgments. We propose a number of further extensions to this work. First, we propose a number of new probabilistic script models leveraging recent advances in Neural Network training. These include recurrent sequence models with different hidden unit structure and Convolutional Neural Network models. Second, we propose integrating more lexical and linguistic information into events. Third, we propose incorporating discourse relations between spans of text into event co-occurrence models, either as output by an off-the-shelf discourse parser or learned automatically. Finally, we propose investigating the interface between models of event co-occurrence and coreference resolution, in particular by integrating script information into general coreference systems.