UniEvent: Unified Generative Model with Multi-Dimensional Prefix for Zero-Shot Event-Relational Reasoning

Zhengwei Tao, Zhi Jin, Haiyan Zhao, Chengfeng Dou, yongqiang zhao, Tao Shen, Chongyang Tao

Main: NLP Applications Main-poster Paper

Session 1: NLP Applications (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: knowledge graphs
TLDR: Reasoning about events and their relations attracts surging research efforts since it is regarded as an indispensable ability to fulfill various event-centric or common-sense reasoning tasks. However, these tasks often suffer from limited data availability due to the labor-intensive nature of their ...
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Abstract: Reasoning about events and their relations attracts surging research efforts since it is regarded as an indispensable ability to fulfill various event-centric or common-sense reasoning tasks. However, these tasks often suffer from limited data availability due to the labor-intensive nature of their annotations. Consequently, recent studies have explored knowledge transfer approaches within a multi-task learning framework to address this challenge. Although such methods have achieved acceptable results, such brute-force solutions struggle to effectively transfer event-relational knowledge due to the vast array of inter-event relations (e.g. temporal, causal, conditional) and reasoning formulations (e.g. discriminative, abductive, ending prediction). To enhance knowledge transfer and enable zero-shot generalization among various combinations, in this work we propose a novel unified framework, called UNIEVENT. Inspired by prefix-based multitask learning, our approach organizes event relational reasoning tasks into a coordinate system with multiple axes, representing inter-event relations and reasoning formulations. We then train a unified text-to-text generative model that utilizes coordinate-assigning prefixes for each task. By leveraging our adapted prefixes, our unified model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on both zero-shot and supervised reasoning tasks, as demonstrated in extensive experiments