# Towards Better Question Generation in QA-based Event Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10517 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10517/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01335/) (2024)
- [Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13712/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Prompt for Extraction? PAIE: Prompting Argument Interaction for Event Argument Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12109/) (2022)
- [Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11517/) (2024)
- [Controllable Generation from Pre-trained Language Models via Inverse Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10685/) (2021)
- [Event Extraction as Question Generation and Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05567/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13958/) (2025)
- [Event Extraction in Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19537/) (2025)
- [Macro Graph of Experts for Billion-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10520/) (2025)
- [Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31058/) (2026)
- [EAGER: Enhancing Generative Event Extraction via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29230/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event Extraction (EE) is an essential information extraction task that aims to extract event-related information from unstructured texts. The paradigm of this task has shifted from conventional classification-based methods to more contemporary question-answering-based (QA-based) approaches. However, in QA-based EE, the quality of the questions dramatically affects the extraction accuracy, and how to generate high-quality questions for QA-based EE remains a challenge. In this work, to tackle this challenge, we suggest four criteria to evaluate the quality of a question and propose a reinforcement learning method, RLQG, for QA-based EE that can generate generalizable, high-quality, and context-dependent questions and provides clear guidance to QA models. The extensive experiments conducted on ACE and RAMS datasets have strongly validated our approach's effectiveness, which also demonstrates its robustness in scenarios with limited training data. The corresponding code of RLQG is released for further research.