Temporal validity reassessment: commonsense reasoning about information obsoleteness

Abstract

It is useful for machines to know whether text information remains valid or not for various applications including text comprehension, story understanding, temporal information retrieval, and user state tracking on microblogs as well as via chatbot conversations. This kind of inference is still difficult for current models, including also large language models, as it requires temporal commonsense knowledge and reasoning. We approach in this paper the task of Temporal Validity Reassessment, inspired by traditional natural language reasoning to determine the updates of the temporal validity of text content. The task requires judgment whether actions expressed in a sentence are still ongoing or rather completed, hence, whether the sentence still remains valid or has become obsolete, given the presence of context in the form of a supplementary content such as a follow-up sentence. We first construct our own dataset for this task and train several machine learning models. Then we propose an effective method for learning information from an external knowledge base that gives information regarding temporal commonsense knowledge. Using our prepared dataset, we introduce a machine learning model that incorporates the information from the knowledge base and demonstrate that incorporating external knowledge generally improves the results. We also experiment with different embedding types to represent temporal commonsense knowledge as well as with data augmentation methods to increase the size of our dataset.