Mapping Text to Scripts: An Entailment Study

Commonsense knowledge as provided by scripts is crucially relevant for text understanding systems, providing a basis for commonsense inference. This paper considers a relevant subtask of script-based text understanding, the task of mapping event mentions in a text to script events. We focus on script representations where events are associated with paraphrase sets, i.e. sets of crowdsourced event descriptions. We provide a detailed annotation of event mention/description pairs with textual entailment types. We demonstrate that representing events in terms of paraphrase sets can massively improve the performance of text-to-script mapping systems. However, for a residual substantial fraction of cases, deeper inference is still required.