One for All: Neural Joint Modeling of Entities and Events

The previous work for event extraction has mainly focused on the predictions for event triggers and argument roles, treating entity mentions as being provided by human annotators. This is unrealistic as entity mentions are usually predicted by some existing toolkits whose errors might be propagated to the event trigger and argument role recognition. Few of the recent work has addressed this problem by jointly predicting entity mentions, event triggers and arguments. However, such work is limited to using discrete engineering features to represent contextual information for the individual tasks and their interactions. In this work, we propose a novel model to jointly perform predictions for entity mentions, event triggers and arguments based on the shared hidden representations from deep learning. The experiments demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method, leading to the state-of-the-art performance for event extraction.Comment: Accepted at The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Leveraging syntactic parsing to improve event annotation matching

Detecting event mentions is the first step in event extraction from text and annotating them is a notoriously difficult task. Evaluating annotator consistency is crucial when building datasets for mention detection. When event mentions are allowed to cover many tokens, annotators may disagree on their span, which means that overlapping annotations may then refer to the same event or to different events. This paper explores different fuzzy matching functions which aim to resolve this ambiguity. The functions extract the sets of syntactic heads present in the annotations, use the Dice coefficient to measure the similarity between sets and return a judgment based on a given threshold. The functions are tested against the judgments of a human evaluator and a comparison is made between sets of tokens and sets of syntactic heads. The best-performing function is a head-based function that is found to agree with the human evaluator in 89% of cases

Abstractive news summarization based on event semantic link network

This paper studies the abstractive multi-document summarization for event-oriented news texts through event information extraction and abstract representation. Fine-grained event mentions and semantic relations between them are extracted to build a unified and connected event semantic link network, an abstract representation of source texts. A network reduction algorithm is proposed to summarize the most salient and coherent event information. New sentences with good linguistic quality are automatically generated and selected through sentences over-generation and greedy-selection processes. Experimental results on DUC2006 and DUC2007 datasets show that our system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive baselines under both pyramid and ROUGE evaluation metrics

Optimal Hyperparameters for Deep LSTM-Networks for Sequence Labeling Tasks

Selecting optimal parameters for a neural network architecture can often make the difference between mediocre and state-of-the-art performance. However, little is published which parameters and design choices should be evaluated or selected making the correct hyperparameter optimization often a "black art that requires expert experiences" (Snoek et al., 2012). In this paper, we evaluate the importance of different network design choices and hyperparameters for five common linguistic sequence tagging tasks (POS, Chunking, NER, Entity Recognition, and Event Detection). We evaluated over 50.000 different setups and found, that some parameters, like the pre-trained word embeddings or the last layer of the network, have a large impact on the performance, while other parameters, for example the number of LSTM layers or the number of recurrent units, are of minor importance. We give a recommendation on a configuration that performs well among different tasks.Comment: 34 pages. 9 page version of this paper published at EMNLP 201