Event detection is one of the fundamental tasks in information extraction and knowledge graph. However, a realistic event detection system often needs to deal with new event classes constantly. These new classes usually have only a few labeled instances as it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate a large number of unlabeled instances. Therefore, this paper proposes a new task, called class-incremental few-shot event detection. Nevertheless, there are two problems (i.e., old knowledge forgetting and new class overfitting) in this task. To solve these problems, this paper further presents a novel knowledge distillation and prompt learning based method, called Prompt-KD. Specifically, to reduce the forgetting issue about old knowledge, Prompt-KD develops an attention based multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework, where the ancestor teacher model pre-trained on base classes is reused in all learning sessions, and the father teacher model derives the current student model via adaptation. On the other hand, in order to cope with the few-shot learning scenario and alleviate the corresponding new class overfitting problem, Prompt-KD is also equipped with a prompt learning mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., FewEvent and MAVEN, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Prompt-KD.

Nested Event Extraction (NEE) aims to extract complex event structures where an event contains other events as its arguments recursively. Nested events involve a kind of Pivot Elements (PEs) that simultaneously act as arguments of outer-nest events and as triggers of inner-nest events, and thus connect them into nested structures. This special characteristic of PEs brings challenges to existing NEE methods, as they cannot well cope with the dual identities of PEs. Therefore, this paper proposes a new model, called PerNee, which extracts nested events mainly based on recognizing PEs. Specifically, PerNee first recognizes the triggers of both inner-nest and outer-nest events and further recognizes the PEs via classifying the relation type between trigger pairs. The model uses prompt learning to incorporate information from both event types and argument roles for better trigger and argument representations to improve NEE performance. Since existing NEE datasets (e.g., Genia11) are limited to specific domains and contain a narrow range of event types with nested structures, we systematically categorize nested events in the generic domain and construct a new NEE dataset, called ACE2005-Nest. Experimental results demonstrate that PerNee consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005-Nest, Genia11, and Genia13. The ACE2005-Nest dataset and the code of the PerNee model are available at https://github.com/waysonren/PerNee.

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG), which characterizes temporally evolving facts in the form of (subject, relation, object, timestamp), has attracted much attention recently. TKG reasoning aims to predict future facts based on given historical ones. However, existing TKG reasoning models are unable to abstain from predictions they are uncertain, which will inevitably bring risks in real-world applications. Thus, in this paper, we propose an abstention mechanism for TKG reasoning, which helps the existing models make selective, instead of indiscriminate, predictions. Specifically, we develop a confidence estimator, called Confidence Estimator with History (CEHis), to enable the existing TKG reasoning models to first estimate their confidence in making predictions, and then abstain from those with low confidence. To do so, CEHis takes two kinds of information into consideration, namely, the certainty of the current prediction and the accuracy of historical predictions. Experiments with representative TKG reasoning models on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CEHis.

Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) that predicts temporal facts (e.g., events) in the future is crucial for many applications. The temporal facts in existing TKGs only contain their core entities (i.e., the entities playing core roles therein) and formulate them as quadruples, i.e., (subject entity, predicate, object entity, timestamp). This formulation oversimplifies temporal facts and inevitably causes information loss. Therefore, we propose to describe a temporal fact more accurately as an n-tuple, containing not only its predicate and core entities, but also its auxiliary entities, as well as the roles of all entities. By so doing, TKGs are augmented to N-tuple Temporal Knowledge Graphs (N-TKGs). To conduct reasoning over N-TKGs, we further propose N-tuple Evolutional Network (NE-Net). It recurrently learns the evolutional representations of entities and predicates in temporal facts at different timestamps in the history via modeling the relations among those entities and predicates. Based on the learned representations, reasoning tasks at future timestamps can be realized via task-specific decoders. Experiment results on two newly built datasets demonstrate the superiority of N-TKG and the effectiveness of NE-Net.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to identify causal relations between events in unstructured texts. This is a very challenging task, because causal relations are usually expressed by implicit associations between events. Existing methods usually capture such associations by directly modeling the texts with pre-trained language models, which underestimate two kinds of semantic structures vital to the ECI task, namely, event-centric structure and event-associated structure. The former includes important semantic elements related to the events to describe them more precisely, while the latter contains semantic paths between two events to provide possible supports for ECI. In this paper, we study the implicit associations between events by modeling the above explicit semantic structures, and propose a Semantic Structure Integration model (SemSIn).It utilizes a GNN-based event aggregator to integrate the event-centric structure information, and employs an LSTM-based path aggregator to capture the event-associated structure information between two events. Experimental results on three widely used datasets show that SemSIn achieves significant improvements over baseline methods.

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps. TKG reasoning aims to predict potential facts in the future given the historical KG sequences. One key of this task is to mine and understand evolutional patterns of facts from these sequences. The evolutional patterns are complex in two aspects, length-diversity and time-variability. Existing models for TKG reasoning focus on modeling fact sequences of a fixed length, which cannot discover complex evolutional patterns that vary in length. Furthermore, these models are all trained offline, which cannot well adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns from then on. Thus, we propose a new model, called Complex Evolutional Network (CEN), which uses a length-aware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to handle evolutional patterns of different lengths via an easy-to-difficult curriculum learning strategy. Besides, we propose to learn the model under the online setting so that it can adapt to the changes of evolutional patterns over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CEN obtains substantial performance improvement under both the traditional offline and the proposed online settings.

Prototypical network based joint methods have attracted much attention in few-shot event detection, which carry out event detection in a unified sequence tagging framework. However, these methods suffer from the inaccurate prototype representation problem, due to two main reasons: the number of instances for calculating prototypes is limited; And, they do not well capture the relationships among event prototypes. To deal with this problem, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced self-supervised Prototypical Network, called KE-PN, for few-shot event detection. KE-PN adopts hybrid rules, which can automatically align event types to an external knowledge base, i.e., FrameNet, to obtain more instances.It proposes a self-supervised learning method to filter out noisy data from enhanced instances. KE-PN is further equipped with an auxiliary event type relationship classification module, which injects the relationship information into representations of event prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., FewEvent, MAVEN, and ACE2005 demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of KE-PN.

A Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) is a sequence of KGs with respective timestamps, which adopts quadruples in the form of (subject, relation, object, timestamp) to describe dynamic facts. TKG reasoning has facilitated many real-world applications via answering such queries as (query entity, query relation, ?, future timestamp) about future. This is actually a matching task between a query and candidate entities based on their historical structures, which reflect behavioral trends of the entities at different timestamps. In addition, recent KGs provide background knowledge of all the entities, which is also helpful for the matching. Thus, in this paper, we propose the Historical Structure Matching (HiSMatch) model. It applies two structure encoders to capture the semantic information contained in the historical structures of the query and candidate entities. Besides, it adopts another encoder to integrate the background knowledge into the model. TKG reasoning experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed HiSMatch model, with up to 5.6% performance improvement in MRR, compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Complex question generation over knowledge bases (KB) aims to generate natural language questions involving multiple KB relations or functional constraints. Existing methods train one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. However, such a one-size-fits-all strategy may not perform well since complex questions exhibit an uneven distribution in many dimensions, such as question types, involved KB relations, and query structures, resulting in insufficient learning for long-tailed samples under different dimensions. To address this problem, we propose a meta-learning framework for complex question generation. The meta-trained generator can acquire universal and transferable meta-knowledge and quickly adapt to long-tailed samples through a few most related training samples. To retrieve similar samples for each input query, we design a self-supervised graph retriever to learn distributed representations for samples, and contrastive learning is leveraged to improve the learned representations. We conduct experiments on both WebQuestionsSP and ComplexWebQuestion, and results on long-tailed samples of different dimensions have been significantly improved, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Scripts are structured sequences of events together with the participants, which are extracted from the texts. Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the historical events in the script. Two kinds of information facilitate this task, namely, the event-level information and the script-level information. At the event level, existing studies view an event as a verb with its participants, while neglecting other useful properties, such as the state of the participants. At the script level, most existing studies only consider a single event sequence corresponding to one common protagonist. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model, called MCPredictor, which integrates deep event-level and script-level information for script event prediction. At the event level, MCPredictor utilizes the rich information in the text to obtain more comprehensive event semantic representations. At the script-level, it considers multiple event sequences corresponding to different participants of the subsequent event. The experimental results on the widely-used New York Times corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.