Boundary-Aware LLM Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Argument Extraction

Zhaoyue Sun, Gabriele Pergola, Yulan He


Abstract
Event argument extraction (EAE) is a crucial task in information extraction. However, its performance heavily depends on expensive annotated data, making data scarcity a persistent challenge. Data augmentation serves as an effective approach to improving model performance in low-resource settings, yet research on applying LLMs for EAE augmentation remains preliminary. In this study, we pay attention to the boundary sensitivity of EAE and investigate four LLM-based augmentation strategies: argument replacement, adjunction rewriting, their combination, and annotation generation. We conduct comprehensive experiments across four benchmark datasets, employing GPT-4o-Mini and DeepSeek-R1-7B as data generators. Our results show that boundary-aware augmentation consistently leads to greater performance improvements over boundary-agnostic methods. In addition to performance gains, we provide a detailed analysis of augmentation quality from multiple perspectives, including uncertainty reduction, error types, data quality, and data scale. This work offers both empirical evidence and practical guidance for leveraging LLMs to enhance event argument extraction under low-resource conditions.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.230
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4937–4953
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.230/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaoyue Sun, Gabriele Pergola, and Yulan He. 2026. Boundary-Aware LLM Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Argument Extraction. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4937–4953, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Boundary-Aware LLM Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Argument Extraction (Sun et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.230.pdf