# Improving Zero-Shot Event Extraction via Sentence Simplification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13625/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolution over Pruned Dependency Trees Improves Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10185/) (2018)
- [Jointly Multiple Events Extraction via Attention-based Graph Information Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09078/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01066/) (2017)
- [EditNTS: An Neural Programmer-Interpreter Model for Sentence Simplification through Explicit Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08104/) (2019)
- [Sentence-Level Fluency Evaluation: References Help, But Can Be Spared!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08731/) (2018)
- [Extending a Parser to Distant Domains Using a Few Dozen Partially Annotated Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06556/) (2018)
- [Iterative Edit-Based Unsupervised Sentence Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09639/) (2020)
- [Resource-Enhanced Neural Model for Event Argument Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03022/) (2020)
- ['Beating the news' with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest using Open Source Indicators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.7035/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Global Constraints with Prompting for Zero-Shot Event Argument Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04459/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2022): Workshop and Shared Task Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11359/) (2022)
- [On the use of Silver Standard Data for Zero-shot Classification Tasks in Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18061/) (2024)
- [Robust Claim Verification Through Fact Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18367/) (2024)
- [A Monte Carlo Language Model Pipeline for Zero-Shot Sociopolitical Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15051/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of sites such as ACLED and Our World in Data have demonstrated the massive utility of extracting events in structured formats from large volumes of textual data in the form of news, social media, blogs and discussion forums. Event extraction can provide a window into ongoing geopolitical crises and yield actionable intelligence. With the proliferation of large pretrained language models, Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has emerged as a new paradigm for event extraction in recent times. In this approach, event argument extraction is framed as an extractive question-answering task. One of the key advantages of the MRC-based approach is its ability to perform zero-shot extraction. However, the problem of long-range dependencies, i.e., large lexical distance between trigger and argument words and the difficulty of processing syntactically complex sentences plague MRC-based approaches. In this paper, we present a general approach to improve the performance of MRC-based event extraction by performing unsupervised sentence simplification guided by the MRC model itself. We evaluate our approach on the ICEWS geopolitical event extraction dataset, with specific attention to `Actor' and `Target' argument roles. We show how such context simplification can improve the performance of MRC-based event extraction by more than 5% for actor extraction and more than 10% for target extraction.