%0 Conference Proceedings %T Reading the Manual: Event Extraction as Definition Comprehension %A Chen, Yunmo %A Chen, Tongfei %A Ebner, Seth %A White, Aaron Steven %A Van Durme, Benjamin %Y Agrawal, Priyanka %Y Kozareva, Zornitsa %Y Kreutzer, Julia %Y Lampouras, Gerasimos %Y Martins, André %Y Ravi, Sujith %Y Vlachos, Andreas %S Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP %D 2020 %8 November %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online %F chen-etal-2020-reading %X We ask whether text understanding has progressed to where we may extract event information through incremental refinement of bleached statements derived from annotation manuals. Such a capability would allow for the trivial construction and extension of an extraction framework by intended end-users through declarations such as, “Some person was born in some location at some time.” We introduce an example of a model that employs such statements, with experiments illustrating we can extract events under closed ontologies and generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new definitions. %R 10.18653/v1/2020.spnlp-1.9 %U https://aclanthology.org/2020.spnlp-1.9 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.spnlp-1.9 %P 74-83