A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction

Wanlong Liu, Enqi Zhang, Shaohuan Cheng, Dingyi Zeng, Li Zhou, Chen Zhang, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen


Abstract
Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from the memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.85
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1278–1293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.85/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wanlong Liu, Enqi Zhang, Shaohuan Cheng, Dingyi Zeng, Li Zhou, Chen Zhang, Malu Zhang, and Wenyu Chen. 2025. A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1278–1293, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.85.pdf