Zero-shot Event Extraction via Transfer Learning: Challenges and Insights

Qing Lyu, Hongming Zhang, Elior Sulem, Dan Roth

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

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 zeroshot 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.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages322-332
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085527
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes
EventJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 1 Aug 20216 Aug 2021

Publication series

NameACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
Volume2

Conference

ConferenceJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period1/08/216/08/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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