Efficient Document-level Event Relation Extraction

Ruochen Li, Zimu Wang, Xinya Du


Abstract
Event Relation Extraction (ERE) predicts temporal and causal relationships between events, playing a crucial role in constructing comprehensive event knowledge graphs. However, existing approaches based on pairwise comparisons often suffer from computational inefficiency, particularly at the document level, due to the quadratic operations required. Additionally, the predominance of unrelated events also leads to largely skewed data distributions. In this paper, we propose an innovative two-stage framework to tackle the challenges, consisting of a retriever to identify the related event pairs and a cross-encoder to classify the relationships between the retrieved pairs. Evaluations across representative benchmarks demonstrate our approach achieves better efficiency and significantly better performance. We also investigate leveraging event coreference chains for ERE and demonstrate their effectiveness.
Anthology ID:
2025.repl4nlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, NM
Editors:
Vaibhav Adlakha, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Xiang Lorraine Li, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Freda Shi, Giorgos Vernikos
Venues:
RepL4NLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–99
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2025.repl4nlp-1.7/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.repl4nlp-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruochen Li, Zimu Wang, and Xinya Du. 2025. Efficient Document-level Event Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2025), pages 92–99, Albuquerque, NM. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient Document-level Event Relation Extraction (Li et al., RepL4NLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2025.repl4nlp-1.7.pdf