DEEDP: Document-Level Event Extraction Model Incorporating Dependency Paths

Abstract

Document-level event extraction (DEE) aims at extracting event records from given documents. Existing DEE methods handle troublesome challenges by using multiple encoders and casting the task into a multi-step paradigm. However, most of the previous approaches ignore a missing feature by using mean pooling or max pooling operations in different encoding stages and have not explicitly modeled the interdependency features between input tokens, and thus the long-distance problem cannot be solved effectively. In this study, we propose Document-level Event Extraction Model Incorporating Dependency Paths (DEEDP), which introduces a novel multi-granularity encoder framework to tackle the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we first designed a Transformer-based encoder, Transformer-M, by adding a Syntactic Feature Attention mechanism to the Transformer, which can capture more interdependency information between input tokens and help enhance the semantics for sentence-level representations of entities. We then stacked Transformer-M and Transformer to integrate sentence-level and document-level features; we thus obtained semantic enhanced document-aware representations for each entity and model long-distance dependencies between arguments. Experimental results on the benchmarks MUC-4 and ChFinAnn demonstrate that DEEDP achieves superior performance over the baselines, proving the effectiveness of our proposed methods.