Title
Temporal Reasoning on Implicit Events from Distant Supervision
Abstract
Existing works on temporal reasoning among events described in text focus on modeling relationships between explicitly mentioned events and do not handle event end time effectively. However, human readers can infer from natural language text many implicit events that help them better understand the situation and, consequently, better reason about time. This work proposes a new crowd-sourced dataset, TRACIE, which evaluates systems' understanding of implicit events - events that are not mentioned explicitly in the text but can be inferred from it. This is done via textual entailment instances querying both start and end times of events. We show that TRACIE is challenging for state-of-the-art language models. Our proposed model, SymTime, exploits distant supervision signals from the text itself and reasons over events' start time and duration to infer events' end time points. We show that our approach improves over baseline language models, gaining 5% on the i.i.d. split and 9% on an out-of-distribution test split. Our approach is also general to other annotation schemes, gaining 2%-8% on MATRES, an extrinsic temporal relation benchmark.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
NAACL-HLT
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ben Zhou162.46
Kyle Richardson264.47
Qiang Ning3189.48
Tushar Khot41076.38
Ashish Sabharwal5106370.62
Dan Roth67735695.19