Generating Uncontextualized and Contextualized Questions for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

This paper presents multiple question generation strategies for document-level event argument extraction. These strategies do not require human involvement and result in uncontextualized questions as well as contextualized questions grounded on the event and document of interest. Experimental results show that combining uncontextualized and contextualized questions is beneficial, especially when event triggers and arguments appear in different sentences. Our approach does not have corpus-specific components, in particular, the question generation strategies transfer across corpora. We also present a qualitative analysis of the most common errors made by our best model.

Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages

Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data. We also demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). Experimental results demonstrate that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).