Lifelong Event Detection with Knowledge Transfer

Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji, Prem Natarajan


Abstract
Traditional supervised Information Extraction (IE) methods can extract structured knowledge elements from unstructured data, but it is limited to a pre-defined target ontology. In reality, the ontology of interest may change over time, adding emergent new types or more fine-grained subtypes. We propose a new lifelong learning framework to address this challenge. We focus on lifelong event detection as an exemplar case and propose a new problem formulation that is also generalizable to other IE tasks. In event detection and more general IE tasks, rich correlations or semantic relatedness exist among hierarchical knowledge element types. In our proposed framework, knowledge is being transferred between learned old event types and new event types. Specifically, we update old knowledge with new event types’ mentions using a self-training loss. In addition, we aggregate old event types’ representations based on their similarities with new event types to initialize the new event types’ representations. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms competitive baselines with a 5.1% absolute gain in the F1 score. Moreover, our proposed framework can boost the F1 score for over 30% absolute gain on some new long-tail rare event types with few training instances. Our knowledge transfer module improves performance on both learned event types and new event types under the lifelong learning setting, showing that it helps consolidate old knowledge and improve novel knowledge acquisition.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.428
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5278–5290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.428
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.428
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji, and Prem Natarajan. 2021. Lifelong Event Detection with Knowledge Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5278–5290, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lifelong Event Detection with Knowledge Transfer (Yu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.428.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.428.mp4
Code
 perfec-yu/lifelong-ed
Data
MAVEN