Class-Incremental Few-Shot Event Detection

Kailin Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Long Bai, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng


Abstract
Event detection is one of the fundamental tasks in information extraction and knowledge graph. However, a realistic event detection system often needs to deal with new event classes constantly. These new classes usually have only a few labeled instances as it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate a large number of unlabeled instances. Therefore, this paper proposes a new task, called class-incremental few-shot event detection. Nevertheless, there are two problems (i.e., old knowledge forgetting and new class overfitting) in this task. To solve these problems, this paper further presents a novel knowledge distillation and prompt learning based method, called Prompt-KD. Specifically, to reduce the forgetting issue about old knowledge, Prompt-KD develops an attention based multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework, where the ancestor teacher model pre-trained on base classes is reused in all learning sessions, and the father teacher model derives the current student model via adaptation. On the other hand, in order to cope with the few-shot learning scenario and alleviate the corresponding new class overfitting problem, Prompt-KD is also equipped with a prompt learning mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., FewEvent and MAVEN, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Prompt-KD.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.290
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3261–3270
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.290
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kailin Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Long Bai, Jiafeng Guo, and Xueqi Cheng. 2024. Class-Incremental Few-Shot Event Detection. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3261–3270, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Class-Incremental Few-Shot Event Detection (Zhao et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.290.pdf