Event Extraction as Natural Language Generation

Event extraction (EE), the task that identifies event triggers and their arguments in text, is usually formulated as a classification or structured prediction problem. Such models usually reduce labels to numeric identifiers, making them unable to take advantage of label semantics (e.g. an event type named Arrest is related to words like arrest, detain, or apprehend). This prevents the generalization to new event types. In this work, we formulate EE as a natural language generation task and propose GenEE, a model that not only captures complex dependencies within an event but also generalizes well to unseen or rare event types. Given a passage and an event type, GenEE is trained to generate a natural sentence following a predefined template for that event type. The generated output is then decoded into trigger and argument predictions. The autoregressive generation process naturally models the dependencies among the predictions -- each new word predicted depends on those already generated in the output sentence. Using carefully designed input prompts during generation, GenEE is able to capture label semantics, which enables the generalization to new event types. Empirical results show that our model achieves strong performance on event extraction tasks under all zero-shot, few-shot, and high-resource scenarios. Especially, in the high-resource setting, GenEE outperforms the state-of-the-art model on argument extraction and gets competitive results with the current best on end-to-end EE tasks.