Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models

Qingkai Min, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Songfang Huang, Zheng Zhang, Yue Zhang


Abstract
Cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) involves clustering event mentions across multiple documents that refer to the same real-world events. Existing approaches utilize fine-tuning of small language models (SLMs) like BERT to address the compatibility among the contexts of event mentions. However, due to the complexity and diversity of contexts, these models are prone to learning simple co-occurrences. Recently, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive contextual understanding, yet they encounter challenges in adapting to specific information extraction (IE) tasks. In this paper, we propose a collaborative approach for CDECR, leveraging the capabilities of both a universally capable LLM and a task-specific SLM. The collaborative strategy begins with the LLM accurately and comprehensively summarizing events through prompting. Then, the SLM refines its learning of event representations based on these insights during fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses the performance of both the large and small language models individually, forming a complementary advantage. Across various datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness in diverse scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2985–3002
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qingkai Min, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Songfang Huang, Zheng Zhang, and Yue Zhang. 2024. Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2985–3002, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models (Min et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.164.pdf