Jointly Extracting Event Triggers and Arguments by Dependency-Bridge RNN and Tensor-Based Argument Interaction

Event extraction plays an important role in natural language processing (NLP) applications including question answering and information retrieval. Traditional event extraction relies heavily on lexical and syntactic features, which require intensive human engineering and may not generalize to different datasets. Deep neural networks, on the other hand, are able to automatically learn underlying features, but existing networks do not make full use of syntactic relations. In this paper, we propose a novel dependency bridge recurrent neural network (dbRNN) for event extraction. We build our model upon a recurrent neural network, but enhance it with dependency bridges, which carry syntactically related information when modeling each word. We illustrates that simultaneously applying tree structure and sequence structure in RNN brings much better performance than only uses sequential RNN. In addition, we use a tensor layer to simultaneously capture the various types of latent interaction between candidate arguments as well as identify/classify all arguments of an event. Experiments show that our approach achieves competitive results compared with previous work.