Abstract
In this work, we investigate transfer learning from semantic role labeling (SRL) to event argument extraction (EAE), considering their similar argument structures. We view the extraction task as a role querying problem, unifying various methods into a single framework. There are key discrepancies on role labels and distant arguments between semantic role and event argument annotations. To mitigate these discrepancies, we specify natural language-like queries to tackle the label mismatch problem and devise argument augmentation to recover distant arguments. We show that SRL annotations can serve as a valuable resource for EAE, and a template-based slot querying strategy is especially effective for facilitating the transfer. In extensive evaluations on two English EAE benchmarks, our proposed model obtains impressive zero-shot results by leveraging SRL annotations, reaching nearly 80% of the fullysupervised scores. It further provides benefits in low-resource cases, where few EAE annotations are available. Moreover, we show that our approach generalizes to cross-domain and multilingual scenarios.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.emnlp-main.169
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Editors:
- Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2627–2647
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.169
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.169
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, and Eduard Hovy. 2022. Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2627–2647, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.169.pdf