Yulong Chen, Huajian Zhang, Yijie Zhou, Xuefeng Bai, Yueguan Wang, Ming Zhong, Jianhao Yan, Yafu Li, Judy Li, Xianchao Zhu, Yue Zhang. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Natural language expresses events with varying granularities, where coarse-grained events (goals) can be broken down into finer-grained event sequences (steps).A critical yet overlooked aspect of understanding event processes is recognizing that not all step events hold equal importance toward the completion of a goal.In this paper, we address this gap by examining the extent to which current models comprehend the essentiality of step events in relation to a goal event.Cognitive studies suggest that such capability enables machines to emulate human commonsense reasoning about preconditions and necessary efforts of everyday tasks.We contribute a high-quality corpus of (goal, step) pairs gathered from the community guideline website WikiHow, with steps manually annotated for their essentiality concerning the goal by experts.The high inter-annotator agreement demonstrates that humans possess a consistent understanding of event essentiality.However, after evaluating multiple statistical and largescale pre-trained language models, we find that existing approaches considerably underperform compared to humans.This observation highlights the need for further exploration into this critical and challenging task 1 .