Emanuela Boros, will defend her PhD Thesis entitled neural methods for event extraction on September 27, 2018 at 2pm. The defence will take place in conférence room, bâtiment 507, LIMSI, Orsay.
Abstract
With the increasing amount of data and the exploding number data sources, the extraction of information about events, whether from the perspective of acquiring knowledge or from a more directly operational perspective, becomes a more and more obvious need. From the point of view of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the extraction of events from texts is the most complex form of Information Extraction (IE) techniques, which more generally encompasses the extraction of named entities and relationships that bind them in the texts. The event extraction task can be represented as a complex combination of relations linked to a set of empirical observations from texts. In practice, an event is described by a trigger (the word or phrase that evokes the event) and a set of participants in that event (that is, arguments or roles) whose values are text excerpts.
This thesis presents several strategies for improving the performance of an Event Extraction (EE) system using neural-based approaches exploiting morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of word embeddings. These have the advantage of not requiring a priori modeling domain knowledge and automatically generate a much larger set of features to learn a model. More specifically, we proposed different deep learning models for two sub-tasks related to EE: event detection and argument detection and classification. Event Detection (ED) is considered an important sub-task of event extraction since the detection of arguments is very directly dependent on its outcome.
As a preliminary to the introduction of our proposed models, we begin by presenting in detail a state-of-the-art model which constitutes the baseline. In-depth experiments are conducted on the use of different types of word embeddings and the influence of the different hyperparameters of the model using the ACE 2005 evaluation framework, a standard evaluation for this task.
We then propose two new models to improve an event detection system. One allows increasing the context taken into account when predicting an event instance (event trigger) by using a sentential context, while the other exploits the internal structure of words by taking advantage of seemingly less obvious but essentially important morphological knowledge. We also reconsider the detection of arguments as a high-order relation extraction and we analyze the dependence of arguments on the ED task.