Language Models Can Improve Event Prediction by Few-Shot Abductive Reasoning

Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction accuracy of event sequence models. We design a modeling and prediction framework where a large language model performs abductive reasoning to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes; a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on two challenging real-world datasets (Amazon Review and GDELT), we demonstrate that our framework---thanks to the reasoning ability of language models---could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.