@inproceedings{adjali-etal-2026-eager,
title = "{EAGER}: Enhancing Generative Event Extraction via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards",
author = "Adjali, Omar and
Liang, Siting and
Bhatti, Omair Shahzad and
Sonntag, Daniel",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1302/",
pages = "27532--27557",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "End-to-end event extraction remains challenging for large language models as it requires simultaneous identification of event triggers, classification of event types, and extraction of schema-grounded argument spans. We present EAGER, a reinforcement learning framework for generative event extraction that combines fine-grained verifiable rewards with Schema-Contrastive Advantage Estimation to alleviate advantage collapse under sparse binary rewards. Our reward design explicitly targets structural validity, extraction accuracy, groundedness, coverage, over-generation, and span precision. Experiments across seven benchmark datasets show that EAGER consistently outperforms prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and prior reinforcement learning baselines, achieving a substantial improvement over the strongest prior method. Results demonstrate that task-aligned verifiable rewards and contrastive advantage estimation substantially improve structured extraction."
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<abstract>End-to-end event extraction remains challenging for large language models as it requires simultaneous identification of event triggers, classification of event types, and extraction of schema-grounded argument spans. We present EAGER, a reinforcement learning framework for generative event extraction that combines fine-grained verifiable rewards with Schema-Contrastive Advantage Estimation to alleviate advantage collapse under sparse binary rewards. Our reward design explicitly targets structural validity, extraction accuracy, groundedness, coverage, over-generation, and span precision. Experiments across seven benchmark datasets show that EAGER consistently outperforms prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and prior reinforcement learning baselines, achieving a substantial improvement over the strongest prior method. Results demonstrate that task-aligned verifiable rewards and contrastive advantage estimation substantially improve structured extraction.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T EAGER: Enhancing Generative Event Extraction via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
%A Adjali, Omar
%A Liang, Siting
%A Bhatti, Omair Shahzad
%A Sonntag, Daniel
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F adjali-etal-2026-eager
%X End-to-end event extraction remains challenging for large language models as it requires simultaneous identification of event triggers, classification of event types, and extraction of schema-grounded argument spans. We present EAGER, a reinforcement learning framework for generative event extraction that combines fine-grained verifiable rewards with Schema-Contrastive Advantage Estimation to alleviate advantage collapse under sparse binary rewards. Our reward design explicitly targets structural validity, extraction accuracy, groundedness, coverage, over-generation, and span precision. Experiments across seven benchmark datasets show that EAGER consistently outperforms prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and prior reinforcement learning baselines, achieving a substantial improvement over the strongest prior method. Results demonstrate that task-aligned verifiable rewards and contrastive advantage estimation substantially improve structured extraction.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1302/
%P 27532-27557
Markdown (Informal)
[EAGER: Enhancing Generative Event Extraction via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1302/) (Adjali et al., Findings 2026)
ACL