Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kim, Jongho, Lee, Dohyeon, Kim, Minsoo, Hwang, Seung-won
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kim, Jongho
Lee, Dohyeon
Kim, Minsoo
Hwang, Seung-won
author_facet Kim, Jongho
Lee, Dohyeon
Kim, Minsoo
Hwang, Seung-won
contents Accurately understanding temporal relations between events is a critical building block of diverse tasks, such as temporal reading comprehension (TRC) and relation extraction (TRE). For example in TRC, we need to understand the temporal semantic differences between the following two questions that are lexically near-identical: "What finished right before the decision?" or "What finished right after the decision?". To discern the two questions, existing solutions have relied on answer overlaps as a proxy label to contrast similar and dissimilar questions. However, we claim that answer overlap can lead to unreliable results, due to spurious overlaps of two dissimilar questions with coincidentally identical answers. To address the issue, we propose a novel approach that elicits proper reasoning behaviors through a module for predicting time spans of events. We introduce the Timeline Reasoning Network (TRN) operating in a two-step inductive reasoning process: In the first step model initially answers each question with semantic and syntactic information. The next step chains multiple questions on the same event to predict a timeline, which is then used to ground the answers. Results on the TORQUE and TB-dense, TRC and TRE tasks respectively, demonstrate that TRN outperforms previous methods by effectively resolving the spurious overlaps using the predicted timeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding
Kim, Jongho
Lee, Dohyeon
Kim, Minsoo
Hwang, Seung-won
Computation and Language
Accurately understanding temporal relations between events is a critical building block of diverse tasks, such as temporal reading comprehension (TRC) and relation extraction (TRE). For example in TRC, we need to understand the temporal semantic differences between the following two questions that are lexically near-identical: "What finished right before the decision?" or "What finished right after the decision?". To discern the two questions, existing solutions have relied on answer overlaps as a proxy label to contrast similar and dissimilar questions. However, we claim that answer overlap can lead to unreliable results, due to spurious overlaps of two dissimilar questions with coincidentally identical answers. To address the issue, we propose a novel approach that elicits proper reasoning behaviors through a module for predicting time spans of events. We introduce the Timeline Reasoning Network (TRN) operating in a two-step inductive reasoning process: In the first step model initially answers each question with semantic and syntactic information. The next step chains multiple questions on the same event to predict a timeline, which is then used to ground the answers. Results on the TORQUE and TB-dense, TRC and TRE tasks respectively, demonstrate that TRN outperforms previous methods by effectively resolving the spurious overlaps using the predicted timeline.
title Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14213