# Asking and Answering Questions to Extract Event-Argument Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16413 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16413/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [GPT3Mix: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Text Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08826/) (2021)
- [Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13625/) (2020)
- [Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Conditional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05919/) (2021)
- [Multi-Sentence Argument Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03766/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01066/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mention-Ranking Coreference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08667/) (2016)
- [Prompt for Extraction? PAIE: Prompting Argument Interaction for Event Argument Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12109/) (2022)
- [Textual Entailment for Event Argument Extraction: Zero- and Few-Shot with Multi-Source Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01376/) (2022)
- [A Two-Stream AMR-enhanced Model for Document-level Event Argument Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00241/) (2022)
- [Mask-then-Fill: A Flexible and Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02427/) (2023)
- [ArgFuse: A Weakly-Supervised Framework for Document-Level Event Argument Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10862/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31058/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a question-answering approach to extract document-level event-argument structures. We automatically ask and answer questions for each argument type an event may have. Questions are generated using manually defined templates and generative transformers. Template-based questions are generated using predefined role-specific wh-words and event triggers from the context document. Transformer-based questions are generated using large language models trained to formulate questions based on a passage and the expected answer. Additionally, we develop novel data augmentation strategies specialized in inter-sentential event-argument relations. We use a simple span-swapping technique, coreference resolution, and large language models to augment the training instances. Our approach enables transfer learning without any corpora-specific modifications and yields competitive results with the RAMS dataset. It outperforms previous work, and it is especially beneficial to extract arguments that appear in different sentences than the event trigger. We also present detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses shedding light on the most common errors made by our best model.