Understanding narratives requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires interpreting the likely causes and effects of events, even when they are not mentioned explicitly. In this paper, we introduce COSMOS QA, a large-scale dataset of 35, 600 problems that require commonsense-based reading comprehension, formulated as multiple-choice questions. In stark contrast to most existing reading comprehension datasets where the questions focus on factual and literal understanding of the context paragraph, our dataset focuses on reading between the lines over a diverse collection of people's everyday narratives, asking such questions as "what might be the possible reason of ...?", or "what would have happened if ..." that require reasoning beyond the exact text spans in the context. To establish baseline performances on COSMOS QA, we experiment with several state-of-the-art neural architectures for reading comprehension, and also propose a new architecture that improves over the competitive baselines. Experimental results demonstrate a significant gap between machine (68.4%) and human performance (94%), pointing to avenues for future research on commonsense machine comprehension. Dataset, code and leaderboard is publicly available at https://wilburone.

Distant supervision has been widely used in current systems of fine-grained entity typing to automatically assign categories (entity types) to entity mentions. However, the types so obtained from knowledge bases are often incorrect for the entity mention's local context. This paper proposes a novel embedding method to separately model "clean" and "noisy" mentions, and incorporates the given type hierarchy to induce loss functions. We formulate a joint optimization problem to learn embeddings for mentions and typepaths, and develop an iterative algorithm to solve the problem. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, with an average 15% improvement in accuracy over the next best compared method 1 .

Most previous event extraction studies have relied heavily on features derived from annotated event mentions, thus cannot be applied to new event types without annotation effort. In this work, we take a fresh look at event extraction and model it as a grounding problem. We design a transferable neural architecture, mapping event mentions and types jointly into a shared semantic space using structural and compositional neural networks, where the type of each event mention can be determined by the closest of all candidate types . By leveraging (1) available manual annotations for a small set of existing event types and (2) existing event ontologies, our framework applies to new event types without requiring additional annotation. Experiments on both existing event types (e.g., ACE, ERE) and new event types (e.g., FrameNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Without any manual annotations for 23 new event types, our zero-shot framework achieved performance comparable to a state-of-theart supervised model which is trained from the annotations of 500 event mentions.

We propose a brand new "Liberal" Event Extraction paradigm to extract events and discover event schemas from any input corpus simultaneously. We incorporate symbolic (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation) and distributional semantics to detect and represent event structures and adopt a joint typing framework to simultaneously extract event types and argument roles and discover an event schema. Experiments on general and specific domains demonstrate that this framework can construct high-quality schemas with many event and argument role types, covering a high proportion of event types and argument roles in manually defined schemas. We show that extraction performance using discovered schemas is comparable to supervised models trained from a large amount of data labeled according to predefined event types. The extraction quality of new event types is also promising.

Integrating text and knowledge into a unified semantic space has attracted significant research interests recently. However, the ambiguity in the common space remains a challenge, namely that the same mention phrase usually refers to various entities. In this paper, to deal with the ambiguity of entity mentions, we propose a novel Multi-Prototype Mention Embedding model, which learns multiple sense embeddings for each mention by jointly modeling words from textual contexts and entities derived from a knowledge base. In addition, we further design an efficient language model based approach to disambiguate each mention to a specific sense. In experiments, both qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrate the high quality of the word, entity and multi-prototype mention embeddings. Using entity linking as a study case, we apply our disambiguation method as well as the multi-prototype mention embeddings on the benchmark dataset, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

We present a new dataset and models for comprehending paragraphs about processes (e.g., photosynthesis), an important genre of text describing a dynamic world. The new dataset, ProPara, is the first to contain natural (rather than machine-generated) text about a changing world along with a full annotation of entity states (location and existence) during those changes (81k datapoints). The end-task, tracking the location and existence of entities through the text, is challenging because the causal effects of actions are often implicit and need to be inferred. We find that previous models that have worked well on synthetic data achieve only mediocre performance on ProPara, and introduce two new neural models that exploit alternative mechanisms for state prediction, in particular using LSTM input encoding and span prediction. The new models improve accuracy by up to 19%. The dataset and models are available to the community at

Event extraction for the biomedical domain is more challenging than that in the general news domain since it requires broader acquisition of domain-specific knowledge and deeper understanding of complex contexts. To better encode contextual information and external background knowledge, we propose a novel knowledge base (KB)-driven treestructured long short-term memory networks (Tree-LSTM) framework, incorporating two new types of features: (1) dependency structures to capture wide contexts; (2) entity properties (types and category descriptions) from external ontologies via entity linking. We evaluate our approach on the BioNLP shared task with Genia dataset and achieve a new stateof-the-art result. In addition, both quantitative and qualitative studies demonstrate the advancement of the Tree-LSTM and the external knowledge representation for biomedical event extraction.

Most previous event extraction studies assume a set of target event types and corresponding event annotations are given, which could be very expensive. In this paper, we work on a new task of semi-supervised event type induction, aiming to automatically discover a set of unseen types from a given corpus by leveraging annotations available for a few seen types. We design a Semi-Supervised Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder framework to automatically learn a discrete latent type representation for each seen and unseen type and optimize them using seen type event annotations. A variational autoencoder is further introduced to enforce the reconstruction of each event mention conditioned on its latent type distribution. Experiments show that our approach can not only achieve state-of-the-art performance on supervised event detection but also discover high-quality new event types. 1