An uncertain future: Predicting events using conditional event evolutionary graph

Abstract

SummaryEvent evolutionary graph (EEG) reflects sequential and causal relations between events, which is of great value for event prediction. However, lacking event context in the EEG raises the problems of direction uncertainty and low accuracy when making predictions. In this article, we propose a conditional event evolutionary graph (CEEG) to deal with these problems. CEEG extends EEG with an additional four types of event context, including state, cause, sub‐type, and object. We first extract event context by matching the input with self‐adaptive semantic templates and generalize the context for each event. To identify the evolution direction, we treat it as a binary classification problem and calculate the event transition probability for each direction given the generalized context. Experimental results show that CEEG has a strong ability to generate better event evolutionary paths compared with NAR, EEM, and other non‐context‐based methods.