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BUEES: a bottom-up event extraction system

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Abstract

Traditional event extraction systems focus mainly on event type identification and event participant extraction based on pre-specified event type paradigms and manually annotated corpora. However, different domains have different event type paradigms. When transferring to a new domain, we have to build a new event type paradigm and annotate a new corpus from scratch. This kind of conventional event extraction system requires massive human effort, and hence prevents event extraction from being widely applicable. In this paper, we present BUEES, a bottom-up event extraction system, which extracts events from the web in a completely unsupervised way. The system automatically builds an event type paradigm in the input corpus, and then proceeds to extract a large number of instance patterns of these events. Subsequently, the system extracts event arguments according to these patterns. By conducting a series of experiments, we demonstrate the good performance of BUEES and compare it to a state-of-the-art Chinese event extraction system, i.e., a supervised event extraction system. Experimental results show that BUEES performs comparably (5% higher F-measure in event type identification and 3% higher F-measure in event argument extraction), but without any human effort.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Xiao Ding, Bing Qin & Ting Liu

Authors
  1. Xiao Ding
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  2. Bing Qin
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  3. Ting Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ting Liu.

Additional information

Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61133012 and 61472107) and the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2014CB340503)

A preliminary version was presented at the 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Oct. 14-18, 2013, Japan

ORCID: Xiao DING, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5838-0320

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Ding, X., Qin, B. & Liu, T. BUEES: a bottom-up event extraction system. Frontiers Inf Technol Electronic Eng 16, 541–552 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1400405

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