Document-Level Event Argument Extraction via Optimal Transport

Abstract

Event Argument Extraction (EAE) is one of the sub-tasks of event extraction, aiming to recognize the role of each entity mention toward a specific event trigger. Despite the success of prior works in sentence-level EAE, the document-level setting is less explored. In particular, whereas syntactic structures of sentences have been shown to be effective for sentence-level EAE, prior document-level EAE models totally ignore syntactic structures for documents. Hence, in this work, we study the importance of syntactic structures in document-level EAE. Specifically, we propose to employ Optimal Transport (OT) to induce structures of documents based on sentence-level syntactic structures and tailored to EAE task. Furthermore, we propose a novel regularization technique to explicitly constrain the contributions of unrelated context words in the final prediction for EAE. We perform extensive experiments on the benchmark document-level EAE dataset RAMS that leads to the state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, our experiments on the ACE 2005 dataset reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model in the sentence-level EAE by establishing new state-of-the-art results.