DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generation-Based Event Extraction Model

I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Elizabeth Boschee, Scott Miller, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng


Abstract
Event extraction requires high-quality expert human annotations, which are usually expensive. Therefore, learning a data-efficient event extraction model that can be trained with only a few labeled examples has become a crucial challenge. In this paper, we focus on low-resource end-to-end event extraction and propose DEGREE, a data-efficient model that formulates event extraction as a conditional generation problem. Given a passage and a manually designed prompt, DEGREE learns to summarize the events mentioned in the passage into a natural sentence that follows a predefined pattern. The final event predictions are then extracted from the generated sentence with a deterministic algorithm. DEGREE has three advantages to learn well with less training data. First, our designed prompts provide semantic guidance for DEGREE to leverage DEGREE and thus better capture the event arguments. Moreover, DEGREE is capable of using additional weakly-supervised information, such as the description of events encoded in the prompts. Finally, DEGREE learns triggers and arguments jointly in an end-to-end manner, which encourages the model to better utilize the shared knowledge and dependencies among them. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of DEGREE for low-resource event extraction.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.138
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1890–1908
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.138
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.138
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Elizabeth Boschee, Scott Miller, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng. 2022. DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generation-Based Event Extraction Model. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1890–1908, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generation-Based Event Extraction Model (Hsu et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.138.pdf
Software:
 2022.naacl-main.138.software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.138.mp4
Code
 pluslabnlp/degree +  additional community code