Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation

Yubing Ren, Yanan Cao, Ping Guo, Fang Fang, Wei Ma, Zheng Lin


Abstract
Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks. These retrieval-augmented methods allow models to explicitly acquire prior external knowledge in a non-parametric manner and regard the retrieved reference instances as cues to augment text generation. These methods use similarity-based retrieval, which is based on a simple hypothesis: the more the retrieved demonstration resembles the original input, the more likely the demonstration label resembles the input label. However, due to the complexity of event labels and sparsity of event arguments, this hypothesis does not always hold in document-level EAE. This raises an interesting question: How do we design the retrieval strategy for document-level EAE? We investigate various retrieval settings from the input and label distribution views in this paper. We further augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations sampled from event semantic regions that can cover adequate alternatives in the same context and event schema. Through extensive experiments on RAMS and WikiEvents, we demonstrate the validity of our newly introduced retrieval-augmented methods and analyze why they work.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
293–306
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yubing Ren, Yanan Cao, Ping Guo, Fang Fang, Wei Ma, and Zheng Lin. 2023. Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 293–306, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation (Ren et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.17.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.17.mp4