Reading the Manual: Event Extraction as Definition Comprehension
Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, Seth Ebner, Aaron Steven White, Benjamin Van Durme
Abstract
We ask whether text understanding has progressed to where we may extract event information through incremental refinement of bleached statements derived from annotation manuals. Such a capability would allow for the trivial construction and extension of an extraction framework by intended end-users through declarations such as, Some person was born in some location at some time. We introduce an example of a model that employs such statements, with experiments illustrating we can extract events under closed ontologies and generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new definitions. ea rl ie r in th e w ee k someone AGENT 1 killed someone else VICTIM 2 with something INSTRUMENT 3 in some place PLACE 4 at some time