Few-shot Event Detection: An Empirical Study and a Unified View

Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun


Abstract
Few-shot event detection (ED) has been widely studied, while this brings noticeable discrepancies, e.g., various motivations, tasks, and experimental settings, that hinder the understanding of models for future progress. This paper presents a thorough empirical study, a unified view of ED models, and a better unified baseline. For fair evaluation, we compare 12 representative methods on three datasets, which are roughly grouped into prompt-based and prototype-based models for detailed analysis. Experiments consistently demonstrate that prompt-based methods, including ChatGPT, still significantly trail prototype-based methods in terms of overall performance. To investigate their superior performance, we break down their design elements along several dimensions and build a unified framework on prototype-based methods. Under such unified view, each prototype-method can be viewed a combination of different modules from these design elements. We further combine all advantageous modules and propose a simple yet effective baseline, which outperforms existing methods by a large margin (e.g., 2.7% F1 gains under low-resource setting).
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.628
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11211–11236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.628
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.628
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Yixin Cao, and Aixin Sun. 2023. Few-shot Event Detection: An Empirical Study and a Unified View. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11211–11236, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-shot Event Detection: An Empirical Study and a Unified View (Ma et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.628.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.628.mp4