Low-Resource Event Extraction
Viet Dac Lai
Committee: Thien Huu Nguyen (chair), Daniel Lowd, Humphrey Shi, Gabriela Perez Baez
Dissertation Defense(Aug 2023)
Keywords: Low Resource, Event Extraction

The last decade has seen the extraordinary evolution of deep learning in natural language processing leading to the rapid deployment of many natural language processing applications. However, the field of event extraction did not witness a parallel success story due to the inherent challenges associated with its scalability. The task itself is much more complex than other NLP tasks due to the dependency among its subtasks. This interlocking system of tasks requires a full adaptation of the task whenever one attempts to scale to another domain or language, which is too expensive to scale to thousands of domains and languages. This dissertation introduces a holistic method for expanding event extraction to other domains and languages within the limited available tools and resources. First, this study focuses on designing neural network architecture that enables the integration of external syntactic and graph features as well as external knowledge bases to enrich the hidden representations of the events. Second, this study presents network architecture and training methods for efficient learning under very limited supervision. Third, we created brand new multilingual corpora for event relation extraction to facilitate the research of event extraction in low-resource languages. We also introduce a language-agnostic method to tackle multilingual event relation extraction. Our extensive experiment shows the effectiveness of these methods which will significantly speed up the advance of the event extraction field. We anticipate that this research will stimulate the growth of the event detection field in unexplored domains and languages, ultimately leading to the expansion of language technologies into a more extensive range of diaspora.