Improving event prediction by representing script participants

Automatically learning script knowledge has proved difficult, with previous work not or just barely beating a most-frequent baseline. Script knowledge is a type of world knowledge which can however be useful for various task in NLP and psycholinguistic modelling. We here propose a model that includes participant information (i.e., knowledge about which participants are relevant for a script) and show, on the Dinners from Hell corpus as well as the InScript corpus, that this knowledge helps us to significantly improve prediction performance on the narrative cloze task.