Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying

Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
In this work, we investigate transfer learning from semantic role labeling (SRL) to event argument extraction (EAE), considering their similar argument structures. We view the extraction task as a role querying problem, unifying various methods into a single framework. There are key discrepancies on role labels and distant arguments between semantic role and event argument annotations. To mitigate these discrepancies, we specify natural language-like queries to tackle the label mismatch problem and devise argument augmentation to recover distant arguments. We show that SRL annotations can serve as a valuable resource for EAE, and a template-based slot querying strategy is especially effective for facilitating the transfer. In extensive evaluations on two English EAE benchmarks, our proposed model obtains impressive zero-shot results by leveraging SRL annotations, reaching nearly 80% of the fullysupervised scores. It further provides benefits in low-resource cases, where few EAE annotations are available. Moreover, we show that our approach generalizes to cross-domain and multilingual scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.169
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2627–2647
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.169
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.169
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, and Eduard Hovy. 2022. Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2627–2647, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.169.pdf