Event type induction using latent variables with hierarchical relationship analysis

Abstract

The conventional approach to event extraction requires predefined event types and their corresponding annotations to train event extractors. However, these prerequisites are often difficult to satisfy in real-world applications. To automatically induct event types, most work has been devoted to clustering event triggers, where a cluster of event triggers is represented as an event type. Some works use trigger semantics, while others use co-occurrence relationships to cluster triggers. However, the clustering results of event triggers obtained by the above work are not sufficiently detailed in describing event types, making it difficult to accurately determine the corresponding event types manually. This paper proposes an open-domain event type induction framework that automatically discovers a set of event types from a given corpus. Unlike previous work on event trigger clustering, this paper takes into consideration the hierarchical relationship of event types to partition the event trigger clusters into event mains and subtypes. The framework employs a latent variable-based neural generation module and a semantic-based clustering module, the former of which obtains event trigger clusters representing the main types of events by jointly projecting the co-occurrence and semantic information of event triggers into a latent space for event type latent variable mining, and the latter of which further divides these event trigger clusters into event subtypes based on semantic information. Finally, experiment results show that, compared with the benchmark model, the ETGen-Clus can improve event type quality scores of 6.23% and 3.11% on the two datasets, respectively.