FORECASTQA: A question answering challenge for event forecasting with temporal text data

Abstract

Event forecasting is a challenging, yet important task, as humans seek to constantly plan for the future. Existing automated forecasting studies rely mostly on structured data, such as time-series or event-based knowledge graphs, to help predict future events. In this work, we aim to formulate a task, construct a dataset, and provide benchmarks for developing methods for event forecasting with large volumes of unstructured text data. To simulate the forecasting scenario on temporal news documents, we formulate the problem as a restricted-domain, multiple-choice, question-answering (QA) task. Unlike existing QA tasks, our task limits accessible information, and thus a model has to make a forecasting judgement. To showcase the usefulness of this task formulation, we introduce FORECASTQA, a question-answering dataset consisting of 10,392 event forecasting questions, which have been collected and verified via crowdsourcing efforts. We present our experiments on FORECASTQA using BERT-based models and find that our best model achieves 61.0% accuracy on the dataset, which still lags behind human performance by about 19%. We hope FORECASTQA will support future research efforts in bridging this gap.