Continual event detection is a cornerstone in uncovering valuable patterns in many dynamic practical applications, where novel events emerge daily. Existing state-of-the-art approaches with replay buffers still suffer from catastrophic forgetting, partially due to overly simplistic objective aggregation. This oversight disregards complex trade-offs and leads to sub-optimal gradient updates, resulting in performance deterioration across objectives. While there are successful, widely cited multi-objective optimization frameworks for multi-task learning, they lack mechanisms to address data imbalance and evaluate whether a Pareto-optimal solution can effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, rendering them unsuitable for direct application to continual learning. To address these challenges, we propose **SharpSeq**, a novel continual learning paradigm leveraging sharpness-aware minimization combined with a generative model to balance training data distribution. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of SharpSeq in continual event detection, proving the importance of our approach in mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual event detection.

Event Extraction (EE) is a fundamental task in information extraction, aimed at identifying events and their associated arguments within textual data. It holds significant importance in various applications and serves as a catalyst for the development of related tasks. Despite the availability of numerous datasets and methods for event extraction in various languages, there has been a notable absence of a dedicated dataset for the Vietnamese language. To address this limitation, we propose BKEE, a novel event extraction dataset for Vietnamese. BKEE encompasses over 33 distinct event types and 28 different event argument roles, providing a labeled dataset for entity mentions, event mentions, and event arguments on 1066 documents. Additionally, we establish robust baselines for potential downstream tasks on this dataset, facilitating the analysis of challenges and future development prospects in the field of Vietnamese event extraction.

Our work addresses the problem of unsupervised Aspect Category Detection using a small set of seed words. Recent works have focused on learning embedding spaces for seed words and sentences to establish similarities between sentences and aspects. However, aspect representations are limited by the quality of initial seed words, and model performances are compromised by noise. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a simple framework that automatically enhances the quality of initial seed words and selects high-quality sentences for training instead of using the entire dataset. Our main concepts are to add a number of seed words to the initial set and to treat the task of noise resolution as a task of augmenting data for a low-resource task. In addition, we jointly train Aspect Category Detection with Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect Term Polarity to further enhance performance. This approach facilitates shared representation learning, allowing Aspect Category Detection to benefit from the additional guidance offered by other tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework surpasses strong baselines on standard datasets.

Aspect detection is a fundamental task in opinion mining. Previous works use seed words either as priors of topic models, as anchors to guide the learning of aspects, or as features of aspect classifiers. This paper presents a novel weakly-supervised method to exploit seed words for aspect detection based on an encoder architecture. The encoder maps segments and aspects into a low-dimensional embedding space. The goal is approximating similarity between segments and aspects in the embedding space and their ground-truth similarity generated from seed words. An objective function is proposed to capture the uncertainty of ground-truth similarity. Our method outperforms previous works on several benchmarks in various domains.