Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying

In this work, we investigate transfer learning from semantic role labeling (SRL) to event argument extraction (EAE), considering their similar argument structures. We view the extraction task as a role querying problem, unifying various methods into a single framework. There are key discrepancies on role labels and distant arguments between semantic role and event argument annotations. To mitigate these discrepancies, we specify natural language-like queries to tackle the label mismatch problem and devise argument augmentation to recover distant arguments. We show that SRL annotations can serve as a valuable resource for EAE, and a template-based slot querying strategy is especially effective for facilitating the transfer. In extensive evaluations on two English EAE benchmarks, our proposed model obtains impressive zero-shot results by leveraging SRL annotations, reaching nearly 80% of the fully-supervised scores. It further provides benefits in low-resource cases, where few EAE annotations are available. Moreover, we show that our approach generalizes to cross-domain and multilingual scenarios. © 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.