Nested event structures are a common occurrence in both open domain and domain specific extraction tasks, e.g., a "crime" event can cause a "investigation" event, which can lead to an "arrest" event. However, most current approaches address event extraction with highly local models that extract each event and argument independently. We propose a simple approach for the extraction of such structures by taking the tree of event-argument relations and using it directly as the representation in a reranking dependency parser. This provides a simple framework that captures global properties of both nested and flat event structures. We explore a rich feature space that models both the events to be parsed and context from the original supporting text. Our approach obtains competitive results in the extraction of biomedical events from the BioNLP'09 shared task with a F1 score of 53.5% in development and 48.6% in testing.
REF casted the problem of biomedical event extraction as a dependency parsing problem.
Event Extraction as Dependency Parsing
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Computer Science