Learning Semantic Script Knowledge with Event Embeddings

Induction of common sense knowledge about prototypical sequences of events has recently received much attention (e.g., (Chambers & Jurafsky, 2008; Regneri et al., 2010)). Instead of inducing this knowledge in the form of graphs, as in much of the previous work, in our method, distributed representations of event realizations are computed based on distributed representations of predicates and their arguments, and then these representations are used to predict prototypical event orderings. The parameters of the compositional process for computing the event representations and the ranking component of the model are jointly estimated from texts. We show that this approach results in a substantial boost in ordering performance with respect to previous methods.