Semantic Frame Forecast

Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Hao Huang


Abstract
This paper introduces Semantic Frame Forecast, a task that predicts the semantic frames that will occur in the next 10, 100, or even 1,000 sentences in a running story. Prior work focused on predicting the immediate future of a story, such as one to a few sentences ahead. However, when novelists write long stories, generating a few sentences is not enough to help them gain high-level insight to develop the follow-up story. In this paper, we formulate a long story as a sequence of “story blocks,” where each block contains a fixed number of sentences (e.g., 10, 100, or 200). This formulation allows us to predict the follow-up story arc beyond the scope of a few sentences. We represent a story block using the term frequencies (TF) of semantic frames in it, normalized by each frame’s inverse document frequency (IDF). We conduct semantic frame forecast experiments on 4,794 books from the Bookcorpus and 7,962 scientific abstracts from CODA-19, with block sizes ranging from 5 to 1,000 sentences. The results show that automated models can forecast the follow-up story blocks better than the random, prior, and replay baselines, indicating the feasibility of the task. We also learn that the models using the frame representation as features outperform all the existing approaches when the block size is over 150 sentences. The human evaluation also shows that the proposed frame representation, when visualized as word clouds, is comprehensible, representative, and specific to humans.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.215
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2702–2713
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.215
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.215
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chieh-Yang Huang and Ting-Hao Huang. 2021. Semantic Frame Forecast. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2702–2713, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Frame Forecast (Huang & Huang, NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.215.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.215.mp4
Code
 appleternity/FrameForecasting
Data
BookCorpusCODA-19FrameNet