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A survey of script learning

脚本学习综述

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Abstract

Script is the structured knowledge representation of prototypical real-life event sequences. Learning the commonsense knowledge inside the script can be helpful for machines in understanding natural language and drawing commonsensible inferences. Script learning is an interesting and promising research direction, in which a trained script learning system can process narrative texts to capture script knowledge and draw inferences. However, there are currently no survey articles on script learning, so we are providing this comprehensive survey to deeply investigate the standard framework and the major research topics on script learning. This research field contains three main topics: event representations, script learning models, and evaluation approaches. For each topic, we systematically summarize and categorize the existing script learning systems, and carefully analyze and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the representative systems. We also discuss the current state of the research and possible future directions.

摘要

脚本是现实世界中日常事件的结构化知识表示. 学习脚本中蕴含的丰富常识知识可以帮助机器理解自然语言并做出常识性推理. 脚本学习是一个颇具用途及潜力的研究方向, 一个经过训练的脚本学习系统可以处理叙事文本, 捕捉其中的脚本知识进而做出推理. 然而目前尚不存在针对脚本学习的综述性文章, 因此我们写作本文以深入研究脚本学习的基本框架和主要研究方向. 脚本学习主要包括3个重点研究内容: 事件表示方式、 脚本学习模型以及性能评估方法. 针对每一主题, 对现有脚本学习系统进行了系统总结和分类, 仔细分析和比较了其中代表性系统的优缺点. 此外, 研究并讨论了脚本学习的发展现状以及未来研究方向.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Yi HAN drafted the manuscript. Linbo QIAO, Jianming ZHENG, and Hefeng WU helped organize the manuscript. Dongsheng LI and Xiangke LIAO led the preparation of the manuscript. Yi HAN and Linbo QIAO revised and finalized the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Linbo Qiao  (乔林波).

Ethics declarations

Yi HAN, Linbo QIAO, Jianming ZHENG, Hefeng WU, Dongsheng LI, and Xiangke LIAO declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61806216)

Yi HAN, first author of this invited paper, received his BS and MS degrees from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and is currently a PhD candidate at the College of Computer Science, NUDT. His research interests include natural language processing, event extraction, and few-shot learning.

Linbo QIAO, corresponding author of this invited paper, received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science and technology from NUDT, Changsha, China in 2010, 2012, and 2017, respectively. Now, he is an assistant research fellow at the National Lab for Parallel and Distributed Processing, NUDT. He worked as a research assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from May to Oct. 2014. His research interests include structured sparse learning, online and distributed optimization, and deep learning for graph and graphical models.

Jianming ZHENG received the BS and MS degrees from NUDT, China in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and is currently a PhD candidate at the School of System Engineering, NUDT. His research interests include semantics representation, few-shot learning and its applications in information retrieval. He has several papers published in SIGIR, WWW, COLING, IPM, Cognitive Computation, etc.

Hefeng WU received the BS degree in Computer Science and Technology and the PhD degree in Computer Application Technology from Sun Yat-sen University, China in 2008 and 2013, respectively. He is currently a full research scientist with the School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include computer vision, multimedia, and machine learning. He has served as a reviewer for many academic journals and conferences, including TIP, TCYB, TSMC, TCSVT, PR, CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and ICML.

Dongsheng LI received his BS degree (with honors) and PhD degree (with honors) in computer science from the College of Computer Science, NUDT, Changsha, China in 1999 and 2005, respectively. He was awarded the prize of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation by the Ministry of Education of China in 2008, and the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2020. He is now a full professor at the National Lab for Parallel and Distributed Processing, NUDT. He is a corresponding expert of Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, cloud computing, and large-scale data management.

Xiangke LIAO received his BS degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1985, and his MS degree from NUDT, Changsha, China in 1988. He is currently a full professor of NUDT, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computer systems, operating systems, cloud computing, and networked embedded systems.

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Han, Y., Qiao, L., Zheng, J. et al. A survey of script learning. Front Inform Technol Electron Eng 22, 341–373 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000347

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000347

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