Schema-Guided Event Reasoning: A Plug-and-Play Event Reasoning Framework Based on Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly demonstrated their potential for event reasoning. However, current LLMs struggle with this task due to their limited capacity to explicitly model the structured semantics of events, resulting in insufficient schema knowledge and low reasoning performance. To address these challenges, we propose SGER, a Schema-Guided Event Reasoning framework. It constructs a systematic solution by decomposing complex event reasoning tasks into three interrelated subtasks: schema extraction, schema prediction, and event reasoning. In the schema extraction stage, the model maps event descriptions with diverse surface forms to potential semantic structure representations, achieving an abstract transformation from instances to schemas. The schema prediction stage captures the potential associations between historical event schemas to make forward-looking inferences about possible future event schemas. In the event reasoning stage, we integrate historical events and predicted schemas into prompts to guide LLMs in generating specific, contextually consistent predicted events. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework significantly improves event reasoning performance of LLMs.