Multi-Sentence Argument Linking via An Event-Aware Hierarchical Encoder

Hang Yang, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Taifeng Wang

Abstract: Multi-sentence argument linking aims at detecting implicit event arguments across sentences, which is indispensable when textual events span across multiple sentences in a document. Previous studies suffer from the inherent limitations of error propagation and lack the explicit modeling of the local and non-local interactions in a textual event. In this paper, we propose an event-aware hierarchical encoder for multi-sentence argument linking. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical encoder to explicitly capture the local and global interactions in a textual event. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary task to predict the event-relevant context in a manner of multi-task learning, which can implicitly benefit the argument linking model to be aware of the event-relevant context. The empirical results on the widely used argument linking dataset show that our model significantly outperforms the baselines, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.