Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

Xianjun Yang, Yujie Lu, Linda Petzold


Abstract
Event argument extraction (EAE) has been well studied at the sentence level but under-explored at the document level. In this paper, we study to capture event arguments that actually spread across sentences in documents. Prior works usually assume full access to rich document supervision, ignoring the fact that the available argument annotation is limited in production. To fill this gap, we present FewDocAE, a Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction benchmark, based on the existing document-level event extraction dataset. We first define the new problem and reconstruct the corpus by a novel N-Way-D-Doc sampling instead of the traditional N-Way-K-Shot strategy. Then we adjust the current document-level neural models into the few-shot setting to provide baseline results under in- and cross-domain settings. Since the argument extraction depends on the context from multiple sentences and the learning process is limited to very few examples, we find this novel task to be very challenging with substantively low performance. Considering FewDocAE is closely related to practical use under low-resource regimes, we hope this benchmark encourages more research in this direction. Our data and codes will be available online.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.446
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8029–8046
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.446
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.446
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xianjun Yang, Yujie Lu, and Linda Petzold. 2023. Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8029–8046, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (Yang et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.446.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.446.mp4