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POQue: Asking Participant-specific Outcome Questions for a Deeper Understanding of Complex Events

  • University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Stony Brook University
  • University of Texas at Austin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire. We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowdworkers are able to (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that make up the situation, (2) annotate the volitional engagement of participants in causing the situation, and (3) ground the outcome of the situation in state changes of the participants. By creating a multi-step interface and a careful quality control strategy, we collect a high quality annotated dataset of 8K short newswire narratives and ROCStories with high inter-annotator agreement (0.74-0.96 weighted Fleiss Kappa). Our dataset, POQue (Participant Outcome Questions), enables the exploration and development of models that address multiple aspects of semantic understanding. Experimentally, we show that current language models lag behind human performance in subtle ways through our task formulations that target abstract and specific comprehension of a complex event, its outcome, and a participant's influence over the event culmination.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
EditorsYoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages8674-8697
Number of pages24
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429401
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022 - Hybrid, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: Dec 7 2022Dec 11 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityHybrid, Abu Dhabi
Period12/7/2212/11/22

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