GEMS: Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction via Multi-perspective Prompts and Ontology Steering

Run Lin, Yao Liu, Yanglei Gan, Yuxiang Cai, Tian Lan, Qiao Liu


Abstract
Generative methods significantly advance event argument extraction by probabilistically generating event argument sequences in a structured format. However, existing approaches primarily rely on a single prompt to generate event arguments in a fixed, predetermined order. Such a rigid approach overlooks the complex structural and dynamic interdependencies among event arguments. In this work, we present GEMS, a multi-prompt learning framework that Generates Event arguments via Multi-perspective prompts and ontology Steering. Specifically, GEMS utilizes multiple unfilled prompts for each sentence, predicting event arguments in varying sequences to explicitly capture the interrelationships between arguments. These predictions are subsequently aggregated using a voting mechanism. Furthermore, an ontology-driven steering mechanism is proposed to ensure that the generated arguments are contextually appropriate and consistent with event-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that GEMS achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in low-resource settings. The source code is available at: https://github.com/AONE-NLP/EAE-GEMS
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1353
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
26392–26409
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1353/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Run Lin, Yao Liu, Yanglei Gan, Yuxiang Cai, Tian Lan, and Qiao Liu. 2025. GEMS: Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction via Multi-perspective Prompts and Ontology Steering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 26392–26409, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GEMS: Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction via Multi-perspective Prompts and Ontology Steering (Lin et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1353.pdf