Discourse-Level Event Temporal Ordering with Uncertainty-Guided Graph Completion

Abstract

Learning to order events at discourse-level is a crucial text understanding task. Despite many efforts for this task, the current state-of-the-art methods rely heavily on manually designed features, which are costly to produce and are often specific to tasks/domains/datasets. In this paper, we propose a new graph perspective on the task, which does not require complex feature engineering but can assimilate global features and learn inter-dependencies effectively. Specifically, in our approach, each document is considered as a temporal graph, in which the nodes and edges represent events and event-event relations respectively. In this sense, the temporal ordering task corresponds to constructing edges for an empty graph. To train our model, we design a graph mask pre-training mechanism, which can learn inter-dependencies of temporal relations by learning to recover a masked edge following graph topology. In the testing stage, we design an certain-first strategy based on model uncertainty, which can decide the prediction orders and reduce the risk of error propagation. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods consistently and can meanwhile maintain good global consistency.