The progress of event extraction research has been hindered by the absence of wide-coverage, large-scale datasets. To make event extraction systems more accessible, we build a general-purpose event detection dataset GLEN, which covers 205K event mentions with 3,465 different types, making it more than 20x larger in ontology than today’s largest event dataset. GLEN is created by utilizing the DWD Overlay, which provides a mapping between Wikidata Qnodes and PropBank rolesets. This enables us to use the abundant existing annotation for PropBank as distant supervision. In addition, we also propose a new multi-stage event detection model specifically designed to handle the large ontology size in GLEN. We show that our model exhibits superior performance compared to a range of baselines including InstructGPT. Finally, we perform error analysis and show that label noise is still the largest challenge for improving performance for this new dataset.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) have gained popularity in e-commerce as they can recommend items during user interactions. However, current open-ended CRS have limited recommendation performance due to their short-sighted training process, which only predicts one utterance at a time without considering its future impact. To address this, we propose a User Simulator (US) that communicates with the CRS using natural language based on given user preferences, enabling long-term reinforcement learning. We also introduce a framework that uses reinforcement learning (RL) with two novel rewards, i.e., recommendation and conversation rewards, to train the CRS. This approach considers the long-term goals and improves both the conversation and recommendation performance of the CRS. Our experiments show that our proposed framework improves the recall of recommendations by almost 100%. Moreover, human evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our framework in enhancing the informativeness of generated utterances.

Events are inter-related in documents. Motivated by the one-sense-per-discourse theory, we hypothesize that a participant tends to play consistent roles across multiple events in the same document. However recent work on document-level event argument extraction models each individual event in isolation and therefore causes inconsistency among extracted arguments across events, which will further cause discrepancy for downstream applications such as event knowledge base population, question answering, and hypothesis generation. In this work, we formulate event argument consistency as the constraints from event-event relations under the document-level setting. To improve consistency we introduce the Event-Aware Argument Extraction (EA²E) model with augmented context for training and inference. Experiment results on WIKIEVENTS and ACE2005 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of EA²E compared to baseline methods.

Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe.