This paper presents an approach for learning to translate simple narratives, i.e., texts (sequences of sentences) describing dynamic systems, into coherent sequences of events without the need for labeled training data. Our approach incorporates domain knowledge in the form of preconditions and effects of events, and we show that it outperforms state-of-the-art supervised learning systems on the task of reconstructing RoboCup soccer games from their commentaries.

We present an approach to map Robocup-soccer narratives (in natural language) to a sequence of meaningful events. Our approach takes advantage of an action-centered framework, an inference subroutine, and an iterative learning algorithm. Our framework represents the narrative as a sequence of sentences and each sentence as a probability distribution over deterministic events. Our learning algorithm maps sentences to meaningful events without any annotated labeled data. Instead, it uses a prior knowledge about event descriptions and an inference subroutine to estimate initial training labels. The algorithm further improves the training labels at next iterations. In our experiments we demonstrate that with no labeled data our algorithm achieves higher accuracy compared to the state of the art that uses labeled data.

We present a framework to represent and reason about narratives that combines logical and probabilistic representations of commonsense knowledge. Unlike most natural language understanding systems, which merely extract facts or semantic roles, our system builds probabilistic representations of the temporal sequence of world states and actions implied by a narrative. We use probabilistic actions to represent ambiguities and uncertainties in the narrative. We present algorithms that take a representation of a narrative, derive all possible interpretations of the narrative, and answer probabilistic queries by marginalizing over all the interpretations. With a focus on spatial contexts, we demonstrate our framework on an example narrative. To this end, we apply natural language pro- cessing (NLP) tools together with statistical approaches over common sense knowledge bases.