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

**Authors:** Xiaoming Shi, Siqiao Xue, Kangrui Wang, Fan Zhou, James Y. Zhang, Jun Zhou, Chenhao Tan, Hongyuan Mei  
**arXiv:** [2305.16646](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16646)  
**Date:** 2023-05-26  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/fr/paper/2305.16646v2/

## Abstract

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 performance of event sequence models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in event prediction. Particularly, the 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 several challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework -- thanks to the reasoning capabilities of large language models -- could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.