Reading the Manual: Event Extraction as Definition Comprehension

We propose a novel approach to event extraction that supplies models with \emph{bleached statements}: machine-readable natural language sentences that are based on annotation guidelines and that describe generic occurrences of events. We introduce a model that incrementally replaces the bleached arguments in a statement with responses obtained by querying text with the statement itself. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is able to extract events under closed ontologies and can generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new bleached statements.