Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance in general chat. However, their domain-specific capabilities, particularly in information extraction, have certain limitations. Extracting structured information from natural language that deviates from known schemas or instructions has proven challenging for previous prompt-based methods. This motivated us to explore domain-specific modeling in chat-based language models as a solution for extracting structured information from natural language. In this paper, we present ChatUIE, an innovative unified information extraction framework built upon ChatGLM. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning is employed to improve and align various tasks that involve confusing and limited samples. Furthermore, we integrate generation constraints to address the issue of generating elements that are not present in the input. Our experimental results demonstrate that ChatUIE can significantly improve the performance of information extraction with a slight decrease in chatting ability.

Traditional continual event detection relies on abundant labeled data for training, which is often impractical to obtain in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce continual few-shot event detection (CFED), a more commonly encountered scenario when a substantial number of labeled samples are not accessible. The CFED task is challenging as it involves memorizing previous event types and learning new event types with few-shot samples. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a memory-based framework: Hierarchical Augmentation Network (HANet). To memorize previous event types with limited memory, we incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set. For the issue of learning new event types in few-shot scenarios, we propose a contrastive augmentation module for token representations. Despite comparing with previous state-of-the-art methods, we also conduct comparisons with ChatGPT. Experiment results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all of these methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.

Causality Explanation Generation refers to generate an explanation in natural language given an initial cause-effect pair. It demands rigorous explicit rationales to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be easily memorized, making it challenging for large language models since they are often suffering from spurious causal associations when they encounter the content that does not exist in their memory. In this work, we introduce LEGO, a Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for causality explanation generation. Specifically, we treat LLM as character malleable LEGO block and utilize role-playing to assign specific roles to five LLMs. We firstly devise a Fine-grained World Knowledge Integration Module to augment information about tasks for alleviating the phenomenon of spurious causal associations. Then, we leverage an Iterative Feedback and Refinement Module to improve the generated explanation by multi-aspect feedback. Extensive experiments on widely used WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets show the superiority of our multi-agent framework in terms of reasoning about the causality among cause and effect.

A growing interest emerges in event extraction which aims to extract multiple events with triggers and arguments. Previous methods mitigate the problem of multiple events extraction by predicting the arguments conditioned on the event trigger and event type, assuming that these arguments belong to a single event. However, the assumption is invalid in general as there may be multiple events. Therefore, we present a unified framework called MatEE for trigger-sharing events extraction. It resolves the kernel bottleneck by effectively modeling the relations between arguments by an event matrix, where trigger-sharing events are represented by multiple cliques. We verify the proposed method on 3 widely-used benchmark datasets of event extraction. The experimental results show that it beats all the advanced competitors, significantly improving the state-of-the-art performances in event extraction.