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DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generative Event Extraction Model

I.-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Elizabeth Boschee, Scott Miller, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in NAACL, 2022.

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Abstract

Event extraction (EE), the task that identifies event triggers and their arguments in text, is usually formulated as a classification or structured prediction problem. Such models usually reduce labels to numeric identifiers, making them unable to take advantage of label semantics (e.g. an event type named Arrest is related to words like arrest, detain, or apprehend). This prevents the generalization to new event types. In this work, we formulate EE as a natural language generation task and propose GenEE, a model that not only captures complex dependencies within an event but also generalizes well to unseen or rare event types. Given a passage and an event type, GenEE is trained to generate a natural sentence following a predefined template for that event type. The generated output is then decoded into trigger and argument predictions. The autoregressive generation process naturally models the dependencies among the predictions – each new word predicted depends on those already generated in the output sentence. Using carefully designed input prompts during generation, GenEE is able to capture label semantics, which enables the generalization to new event types. Empirical results show that our model achieves strong performance on event extraction tasks under all zero-shot, few-shot, and high-resource scenarios. Especially, in the high-resource setting, GenEE outperforms the state-of-the-art model on argument extraction and gets competitive results with the current best on end-to-end EE tasks.

Bib Entry

@inproceedings{hsu2021degree,
  title = {DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generative Event Extraction Model},
  author = {Hsu, I-Hung and Huang, Kuan-Hao and Boschee, Elizabeth and Miller, Scott and Natarajan, Prem and Chang, Kai-Wei and Peng, Nanyun},
  booktitle = {NAACL},
  year = {2022}
}

Related Publications

  1. DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generative Event Extraction Model

    I.-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Elizabeth Boschee, Scott Miller, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in NAACL, 2022.
    Full Text Abstract BibTeX Details 
    Event extraction (EE), the task that identifies event triggers and their arguments in text, is usually formulated as a classification or structured prediction problem. Such models usually reduce labels to numeric identifiers, making them unable to take advantage of label semantics (e.g. an event type named Arrest is related to words like arrest, detain, or apprehend). This prevents the generalization to new event types. In this work, we formulate EE as a natural language generation task and propose GenEE, a model that not only captures complex dependencies within an event but also generalizes well to unseen or rare event types. Given a passage and an event type, GenEE is trained to generate a natural sentence following a predefined template for that event type. The generated output is then decoded into trigger and argument predictions. The autoregressive generation process naturally models the dependencies among the predictions – each new word predicted depends on those already generated in the output sentence. Using carefully designed input prompts during generation, GenEE is able to capture label semantics, which enables the generalization to new event types. Empirical results show that our model achieves strong performance on event extraction tasks under all zero-shot, few-shot, and high-resource scenarios. Especially, in the high-resource setting, GenEE outperforms the state-of-the-art model on argument extraction and gets competitive results with the current best on end-to-end EE tasks.
    @inproceedings{hsu2021degree,
  title = {DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generative Event Extraction Model},
  author = {Hsu, I-Hung and Huang, Kuan-Hao and Boschee, Elizabeth and Miller, Scott and Natarajan, Prem and Chang, Kai-Wei and Peng, Nanyun},
  booktitle = {NAACL},
  year = {2022}
}
    Details

  2. Intent Classification and Slot Filling for Privacy Policies

    Wasi Ahmad, Jianfeng Chi, Tu Le, Thomas Norton, Yuan Tian, and Kai-Wei Chang, in ACL, 2021.
    Full Text Video Code Abstract BibTeX Details 
    Understanding privacy policies is crucial for users as it empowers them to learn about the information that matters to them. Sentences written in a privacy policy document explain privacy practices, and the constituent text spans convey further specific information about that practice. We refer to predicting the privacy practice explained in a sentence as intent classification and identifying the text spans sharing specific information as slot filling. In this work, we propose PolicyIE, a corpus consisting of 5,250 intent and 11,788 slot annotations spanning 31 privacy policies of websites and mobile applications. PolicyIE corpus is a challenging benchmark with limited labeled examples reflecting the cost of collecting large-scale annotations. We present two alternative neural approaches as baselines: (1) formulating intent classification and slot filling as a joint sequence tagging and (2) modeling them as a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning task. Experiment results show that both approaches perform comparably in intent classification, while the Seq2Seq method outperforms the sequence tagging approach in slot filling by a large margin. Error analysis reveals the deficiency of the baseline approaches, suggesting room for improvement in future works. We hope the PolicyIE corpus will stimulate future research in this domain.
    @inproceedings{ahmad2021intent,
  title = {Intent Classification and Slot Filling for Privacy Policies},
  author = {Ahmad, Wasi and Chi, Jianfeng and Le, Tu and Norton, Thomas and Tian, Yuan and Chang, Kai-Wei},
  booktitle = {ACL},
  year = {2021}
}
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