  Scripts define knowledge about how everyday scenarios (such as going to a
restaurant) are expected to unfold. One of the challenges to learning scripts
is the hierarchical nature of the knowledge. For example, a suspect arrested
might plead innocent or guilty, and a very different track of events is then
expected to happen. To capture this type of information, we propose an
autoencoder model with a latent space defined by a hierarchy of categorical
variables. We utilize a recently proposed vector quantization based approach,
which allows continuous embeddings to be associated with each latent variable
value. This permits the decoder to softly decide what portions of the latent
hierarchy to condition on by attending over the value embeddings for a given
setting. Our model effectively encodes and generates scripts, outperforming a
recent language modeling-based method on several standard tasks, and allowing
the autoencoder model to achieve substantially lower perplexity scores compared
to the previous language modeling-based method.
