Content area
Human languages in the world, such as news or narratives, are structured around events. Focusing on these events allows Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems to better understand plots, infer motivations, consequences, and the dynamics of situations. Despite the rapidly evolving landscape of NLP technology, comprehending complex events, particularly those rarely encountered in training such as in niche domains or low-resource languages, remains a formidable challenge. This thesis explores methods to enhance NLP model generalizability for better adaptability to unfamiliar events and languages unseen during training.
My approach includes two main strategies: (1) Model Perspective: I propose a novel generation-based event extraction framework, largely different from typical solutions that make predictions by learning to classify input tokens. This new framework utilizes indirect supervision from natural language generation, leveraging large-scale unsupervised data without requiring additional training modules dependent on limited event-specific data. Hence, it facilitates the models’ ability on understanding general event concepts. I further explore advanced methods to extend this framework for cross-lingual adaptation and to utilize cross-domain robust resources effectively. (2) Data Perspective: I develop techniques to generate pseudo-training data broaden the training scope for event understanding models. This includes translating structured event labels into other languages with higher accuracy and fidelity, and synthesizing novel events for the existing knowledge base.
Overall, my work introduces a novel learning platform to the NLP community, emphasizing an innovative modeling paradigm and comprehensive data preparation to foster more generalized event understanding models.