A Multimodal Text- and Graph-Based Approach for Open-Domain Event Extraction from Documents

Praval Sharma


Abstract
Event extraction is essential for event understanding and analysis. It supports tasks such as document summarization and decision-making in emergency scenarios. However, existing event extraction approaches have limitations: (1) closed-domain algorithms are restricted to predefined event types and thus rarely generalize to unseen types and (2) open-domain event extraction algorithms, capable of handling unconstrained event types, have largely overlooked the potential of large language models (LLMs) despite their advanced abilities. Additionally, they do not explicitly model document-level contextual, structural, and semantic reasoning, which are crucial for effective event extraction but remain challenging for LLMs due to lost-in-the-middle phenomenon and attention dilution. To address these limitations, we propose multimodal open-domain event extraction, MODEE , a novel approach for open-domain event extraction that combines graph-based learning with text-based representation from LLMs to model document-level reasoning. Empirical evaluations on large datasets demonstrate that MODEE outperforms state-of-the-art open-domain event extraction approaches and can be generalized to closed-domain event extraction, where it outperforms existing algorithms.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.102
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2027–2041
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.102/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Praval Sharma. 2026. A Multimodal Text- and Graph-Based Approach for Open-Domain Event Extraction from Documents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 2027–2041, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Multimodal Text- and Graph-Based Approach for Open-Domain Event Extraction from Documents (Sharma, Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.102.pdf