# Textual Entailment for Event Argument Extraction: Zero- and Few-Shot with Multi-Source Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01042/) (2018)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10205/) (2023)
- [GoLLIE: Annotation Guidelines improve Zero-Shot Information-Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03668/) (2023)
- [Universal Information Extraction as Unified Semantic Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03282/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Instruction Following: A Survey of Progresses and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10475/) (2023)
- [TextEE: Benchmark, Reevaluation, Reflections, and Future Challenges in Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09562/) (2023)
- [GENEVA: Benchmarking Generalizability for Event Argument Extraction with Hundreds of Event Types and Argument Roles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12505/) (2022)
- [The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06918/) (2023)
- [What do Language Models know about word senses? Zero-Shot WSD with Language Models and Domain Inventories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03353/) (2023)
- [OpenStance: Real-world Zero-shot Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14299/) (2022)
- [Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02586/) (2024)
- [STAR: Boosting Low-Resource Information Extraction by Structure-to-Text Data Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15090/) (2023)
- [Generating Uncontextualized and Contextualized Questions for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04770/) (2024)
- [Learning to Select from Multiple Options](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00301/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Open Information Extraction for More Robust Domain Transfer of Event Trigger Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14163/) (2023)
- [Explicating the Implicit: Argument Detection Beyond Sentence Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04246/) (2024)
- [On the use of Silver Standard Data for Zero-shot Classification Tasks in Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18061/) (2024)
- [Textual Entailment for Effective Triple Validation in Object Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16293/) (2024)
- [Event Extraction in Basque: Typologically motivated Cross-Lingual Transfer-Learning Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06392/) (2024)
- [MorphNLI: A Stepwise Approach to Natural Language Inference Using Text Morphing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09567/) (2025)
- [Learning to Generate and Extract: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework For Zero-shot Document-level Event Arguments Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02909/) (2026)
- [X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03863/) (2024)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Extract Event-Argument Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16413/) (2024)
- [Entangled Relations: Leveraging NLI and Meta-analysis to Enhance Biomedical Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00226/) (2024)
- [Assessing the Performance of Chinese Open Source Large Language Models in Information Extraction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02079/) (2024)
- [Medical Argument Mining: Exploitation of Scarce Data Using NLI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12823/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work has shown that NLP tasks such as Relation Extraction (RE) can be recasted as Textual Entailment tasks using verbalizations, with strong performance in zero-shot and few-shot settings thanks to pre-trained entailment models. The fact that relations in current RE datasets are easily verbalized casts doubts on whether entailment would be effective in more complex tasks. In this work we show that entailment is also effective in Event Argument Extraction (EAE), reducing the need of manual annotation to 50% and 20% in ACE and WikiEvents respectively, while achieving the same performance as with full training. More importantly, we show that recasting EAE as entailment alleviates the dependency on schemas, which has been a road-block for transferring annotations between domains. Thanks to the entailment, the multi-source transfer between ACE and WikiEvents further reduces annotation down to 10% and 5% (respectively) of the full training without transfer. Our analysis shows that the key to good results is the use of several entailment datasets to pre-train the entailment model. Similar to previous approaches, our method requires a small amount of effort for manual verbalization: only less than 15 minutes per event argument type is needed, and comparable results can be achieved with users with different level of expertise.