Thinking Bidirectionally: A Reasoning and Self-Correction Approach for Text-Based Event Prediction with Large Language Models

摘要

Using Web Mining and Content Analysis to find and understand clues from the massive amount of unstructured text online is very important for predicting future events and providing early risk warnings in important fields like finance and public safety. While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential in processing and understanding text, current text-based event prediction faces two primary challenges: first, an insufficient utilization of potential information within the text, such as causal relationships and latent associations, and second, limited predictive reliability constrained by issues like the LLM's own ability and hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel event prediction framework, Bidirectional Reasoning with Self-Correction (BRSC). BRSC comprises two complementary reasoning dimensions: temporal deductive reasoning, which analyzes the trajectory of historical events along the timeline to enable accurate trend extrapolation, and synchronic associative reasoning, which deeply mines details and latent connections from documents within a specific time window to extended semantic information. In addition, we use a self-correction mechanism that identifies and rectifies potential hallucinations and errors during the reasoning process. Extensive experiments on international relations event prediction demonstrate that BRSC achieves significant improvements over several leading LLM-based methods.