Discriminative Learning for Joint Template Filling

This paper presents a joint model for template filling, where the goal is to automatically specify the fields of target relations such as seminar announcements or corporate acquisition events. The approach models mention detection, unification and field extraction in a flexible, feature-rich model that allows for joint modeling of interdependencies at all levels and across fields. Such an approach can, for example, learn likely event durations and the fact that start times should come before end times. While the joint inference space is large, we demonstrate effective learning with a Perceptron-style approach that uses simple, greedy beam decoding. Empirical results in two benchmark domains demonstrate consistently strong performance on both mention detection and template filling tasks.