Story Comprehension for Predicting What Happens Next

Snigdha Chaturvedi, Haoruo Peng, Dan Roth


Abstract
Automatic story comprehension is a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Understanding, and can enable computers to learn about social norms, human behavior and commonsense. In this paper, we present a story comprehension model that explores three distinct semantic aspects: (i) the sequence of events described in the story, (ii) its emotional trajectory, and (iii) its plot consistency. We judge the model’s understanding of real-world stories by inquiring if, like humans, it can develop an expectation of what will happen next in a given story. Specifically, we use it to predict the correct ending of a given short story from possible alternatives. The model uses a hidden variable to weigh the semantic aspects in the context of the story. Our experiments demonstrate the potential of our approach to characterize these semantic aspects, and the strength of the hidden variable based approach. The model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and achieves best results on a publicly available dataset.
Anthology ID:
D17-1168
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1603–1614
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1168
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1168
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Snigdha Chaturvedi, Haoruo Peng, and Dan Roth. 2017. Story Comprehension for Predicting What Happens Next. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1603–1614, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Story Comprehension for Predicting What Happens Next (Chaturvedi et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1168.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D17-1168.mp4
Data
StoryCloze