Zero-Shot On-the-Fly Event Schema Induction

Anonymous

Abstract: What are the events involved in a pandemic outbreak? What steps should be taken when planning a wedding? The answers to these questions can be found by collecting many documents on the complex event of interest, extracting relevant information and analyzing it. We present a new approach in which large language models are utilized to generate source documents that allow predicting, given a high-level event definition, the specific events, arguments, and relations between them to construct a schema that describes the complex event in its entirety. Using our model, complete schemas on any topic can be generated on-the-fly without any data collection needed, i.e., in a zero-shot manner. Moreover, we develop efficient methods to extract pertinent information from texts and demonstrate, in a series of experiments, that these schemas are considered to be more complete than human-curated ones in the majority of examined scenarios. Finally, we show that this framework is comparable in performance with previous supervised schema induction methods that rely on collecting real texts while being more general and flexible by avoiding the need to use a predefined ontology.

Paper Type: long