@inproceedings{maharjan-etal-2026-benchmarking,
    title = "Benchmarking Models for Low-Resource {N}epali Event Extraction with Trigger Phrase Identification and Event Classification",
    author = "Maharjan, Sujal  and
      Shrestha, Astha  and
      Koduru, Lakshmojee  and
      Poudel, Sweta  and
      Shiwakoti, Shuvam  and
      Thapa, Rabin  and
      Rauniyar, Kritesh  and
      Thapa, Surendrabikram",
    editor = {H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Thapa, Surendrabikram  and
      Tanev, Hristo},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Event Extraction and Understanding: Challenges and Applications ({EEUCA} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.eeuca-1.7/",
    pages = "58--71",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-402-6",
    abstract = "Research on Event Extraction (EE) in South Asian languages is crucial for understanding information dissemination and enabling automated news analysis in morphologically complex, low-resource environments. To address the scarcity of high-quality, publicly available datasets, we present Nepali Event Extraction (NepEE), a manually annotated corpus comprising 10,226 Devanagari sentences. The dataset includes annotations for trigger spans and event types, achieving high inter-annotator agreement with Fleiss' kappa = 0.812 for trigger identification and kappa = 0.855 for event classification. Our dataset was developed through a rigorous iterative three-phase protocol involving five expert native speakers to ensure linguistic precision. We conduct benchmarking across a broad spectrum of approaches, including classical feature-based models, five fine-tuned Transformer encoders, and contemporary instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) using zero-shot and fixed few-shot prompting. Our analysis shows that Indic-specialized Transformers achieve superior classification performance, while traditional methods and few-shot prompting struggle with the challenges of exact span extraction in morphologically complex contexts. Furthermore, we quantify performance differences between sentence-level and span-level tasks, providing strong baselines for future research. The findings and the released NepEE dataset provide a valuable resource for advancing event understanding in low-resource languages (LRLs). All code and resources are available at https://github.com/SUJAL390/EEUCA-ACL-2026-Trigger-Phrase-Identification-and-Event-Classification-in-Low-Resource-Languages."
}