Behind the Scenes: An Exploration of Trigger Biases Problem in Few-Shot Event Classification

Few-Shot Event Classification (FSEC) aims at developing a model for event prediction, which can generalize to new event types with a limited number of annotated data. Existing FSEC studies have achieved high accuracy on different benchmarks. However, we find they suffer from trigger biases that signify the statistical homogeneity between some trigger words and target event types, which we summarize as trigger overlapping and trigger separability. The biases can result in context-bypassing problem, i.e., correct classifications can be gained by looking at only the trigger words while ignoring the entire context. Therefore, existing models can be weak in generalizing to unseen data in real scenarios. To further uncover the trigger biases and assess the generalization ability of the models, we propose two new sampling methods, Trigger-Uniform Sampling (TUS) and COnfusion Sampling (COS), for the meta tasks construction during evaluation. Besides, to cope with the context-bypassing problem in FSEC models, we introduce adversarial training and trigger reconstruction techniques. Experiments show these techniques help not only improve the performance, but also enhance the generalization ability of models.