REAR: Reinforced Reasoning Optimization for Event Argument Extraction with Relation-Aware Support

Jianwen Luo, Yu Hong, Shuai Yang, Jianmin Yao


Abstract
Event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments and classify their roles within events, whereas relation extraction classifies semantic relationships between entities. Existing methods typically design task-specific models for EAE, which restricts the integration of relation-level semantics. Consequently, they overlook the complementary cues from RE that are beneficial for argument role disambiguation. To overcome this limitation, we propose REAR, a Relation-aware EAE Reinforced optimization framework. REAR first conducts joint supervised optimization on reasoning-enhanced data, which serves as a warm-up to strengthen the Large Language Model (LLM)’s ability to perform EAE while incorporating auxiliary cues from RE. Subsequently, it applies reinforcement learning to explore diverse reasoning trajectories and derive near-optimal strategies for integrating relation-level signals into EAE. Experiments on the ACE-E, ACE-E+ and ERE benchmarks demonstrate that REAR consistently surpasses previous decoder-only LLM methods, achieving F1-score gains of at least 0.9%, 2.2% and 1.6%, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.421
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
7957–7972
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.421/
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Cite (ACL):
Jianwen Luo, Yu Hong, Shuai Yang, and Jianmin Yao. 2025. REAR: Reinforced Reasoning Optimization for Event Argument Extraction with Relation-Aware Support. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 7957–7972, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
REAR: Reinforced Reasoning Optimization for Event Argument Extraction with Relation-Aware Support (Luo et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.421.pdf
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