Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

Event argument extraction (EAE) has been well studied at the sentence level but under-explored at the document level. In this paper, we study to capture event arguments that actually spread across sentences in documents. Prior works mainly assume full access to rich document supervision, ignoring the fact that the argument supervision is limited in documents. To fill this gap, we present FewDocAE, a Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction benchmark, based on the largest document-level event extraction dataset DocEE. We first define the new problem and reconstruct the corpus by a novel N-Way-D-Doc sampling instead of the traditional N-Way-K-Shot strategy. Then we adjust the advanced document-level neural models into the few-shot setting to provide baseline results under in- and cross-domain settings. Since the argument extraction depends on the context from multiple sentences and the learning process is limited to very few examples, we find the task to be very challenging with substantively low performance. Considering FewDocAE is closely related to practical use under low-resource regimes, we hope this benchmark encourages more research in this direction. Our data and codes will be available online.