DE3TC: Detecting Events with Effective Event Type Information and Context

Abstract

Event Detection (ED) is a crucial information extraction task that aims to identify the event triggers and classify them into predefined event types. However, most existing methods did not perform well when processing events with implicit triggers. And most methods considered ED as a sentence-level task, lacking effective context for event semantics. Moreover, how to maintain good performance under low resource conditions still needs further study. To address these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end ED model called DE3TC, which Detects Events with Effective Event Type Information and Context. We construct an event type-specific Clue to capture the interaction between event type name and trigger words, providing event type information for implicit triggers. For accessing the effective context of event semantics for sentence-level ED, we consider the correlations between types and select similar types’ descriptions as context. With contextualized representation from a contextual encoder, DE3TC learns the event type information for all events including implicit ones. And it performs sentence-level ED efficiently with effective contexts. The empirical results on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets show that: (i) DE3TC obtains state-of-the-art performance compared with previous methods. (ii) DE3TC is also excelled under low-resource conditions.