# Few-shot Event Detection: An Empirical Study and a Unified View

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01901 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01901/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05779/) (2021)
- [Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13625/) (2020)
- [OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01998/) (2021)
- [Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09232/) (2021)
- [Large Language Model Is Not a Good Few-shot Information Extractor, but a Good Reranker for Hard Samples!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08559/) (2023)
- [MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13590/) (2020)
- [TapNet: Neural Network Augmented with Task-Adaptive Projection for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06549/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Asymmetry for Synthetic Training Data Generation: SynthIE and the Case of Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04132/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Slot Tagging with Collapsed Dependency Transfer and Label-enhanced Task-adaptive Projection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05702/) (2020)
- [DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generation-Based Event Extraction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12724/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Feasibility of ChatGPT for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03836/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01066/) (2017)
- [Few-shot classification in Named Entity Recognition Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06158/) (2018)

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

- [TextEE: Benchmark, Reevaluation, Reflections, and Future Challenges in Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09562/) (2023)
- [MetaIE: Distilling a Meta Model from LLM for All Kinds of Information Extraction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00457/) (2024)
- [SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03303/) (2025)
- [Formulation Comparison for Timeline Construction using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00990/) (2024)
- [Reasoning with RAGged events: RAG-Enhanced Event Knowledge Base Construction and reasoning with proof-assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07042/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot event detection (ED) has been widely studied, while this brings noticeable discrepancies, e.g., various motivations, tasks, and experimental settings, that hinder the understanding of models for future progress.This paper presents a thorough empirical study, a unified view of ED models, and a better unified baseline. For fair evaluation, we compare 12 representative methods on three datasets, which are roughly grouped into prompt-based and prototype-based models for detailed analysis. Experiments consistently demonstrate that prompt-based methods, including ChatGPT, still significantly trail prototype-based methods in terms of overall performance. To investigate their superior performance, we break down their design elements along several dimensions and build a unified framework on prototype-based methods. Under such unified view, each prototype-method can be viewed a combination of different modules from these design elements. We further combine all advantageous modules and propose a simple yet effective baseline, which outperforms existing methods by a large margin (e.g., 2.7% F1 gains under low-resource setting).