Abstract
Event extraction has long been a challenging task, addressed mostly with supervised methods that require expensive annotation and are not extensible to new event ontologies. In this work, we explore the possibility of zero-shot event extraction by formulating it as a set of Textual Entailment (TE) and/or Question Answering (QA) queries (e.g. “A city was attacked” entails “There is an attack”), exploiting pretrained TE/QA models for direct transfer. On ACE-2005 and ERE, our system achieves acceptable results, yet there is still a large gap from supervised approaches, showing that current QA and TE technologies fail in transferring to a different domain. To investigate the reasons behind the gap, we analyze the remaining key challenges, their respective impact, and possible improvement directions.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-short.42
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 322–332
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.42
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.42
- Cite (ACL):
- Qing Lyu, Hongming Zhang, Elior Sulem, and Dan Roth. 2021. Zero-shot Event Extraction via Transfer Learning: Challenges and Insights. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 322–332, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Zero-shot Event Extraction via Transfer Learning: Challenges and Insights (Lyu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2021.acl-short.42.pdf
- Data
- MultiNLI, QAMR