OpenEP: Open-Ended Future Event Prediction

Future event prediction (FEP) is a long-standing and crucial task in the world, as understanding the evolution of events enables early risk identification, informed decision-making, and strategic planning. Existing work typically treats event prediction as classification tasks and confines the outcomes of future events to a fixed scope, such as yes/no questions, candidate set, and taxonomy, which is difficult to include all possible outcomes of future events. In this paper, we introduce OpenEP (an Open -Ended Future E vent P rediction task), which generates flexible and diverse predictions aligned with real-world scenarios. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: firstly, the predictive questions are diverse, covering different stages of event development and perspectives; secondly, the outcomes are flexible, without constraints on scope or format. To facilitate the study of this task, we construct OpenEPBench , a dynamic dataset where events are annotated on the same day they occur. For question construction, we pose questions from seven perspectives, including time, location, event development, event outcome, event impact, event response, and other, to facilitate an in-depth analysis and understanding of the comprehensive evolution of events. For outcome construction, we collect free-form text containing the outcomes as ground truth to provide semantically complete and detail-enriched outcomes. Furthermore, we propose StkFEP , a stakeholder-enhanced future event prediction framework, that incorporates event characteristics for open-ended settings. Our method extracts stakeholders involved in events to extend questions to gather diverse information. We also collect both contextually relevant events and historically analogous events to reveal potential evolutionary patterns. Experimental results indicate that accurately predicting future events in open-ended settings is challenging for existing LLMs. In addition, we thoroughly summarize the problems encountered in prediction, hoping to provide insights for future research 1 .