Hierarchical Event Grounding

Event grounding aims at linking mention references in text corpora to events from a knowledge base (KB). Previous work on this task focused primarily on linking to a single KB event, thereby overlooking the hierarchical aspects of events. Events in documents are typically described at various levels of spatio-temporal granularity (Glavas et al. 2014). These hierarchical relations are utilized in downstream tasks of narrative understanding and schema construction. In this work, we present an extension to the event grounding task that requires tackling hierarchical event structures from the KB. Our proposed task involves linking a mention reference to a set of event labels from a subevent hierarchy in the KB. We propose a retrieval methodology that leverages event hierarchy through an auxiliary hierarchical loss (Murty et al. 2018). On an automatically created multilingual dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical loss against retrieve and re-rank baselines (Wu et al. 2020; Pratapa, Gupta, and Mitamura 2022). Furthermore, we demonstrate the systems' ability to aid hierarchical discovery among unseen events.

Multilingual Event Linking to Wikidata

We present a task of multilingual linking of events to a knowledge base. We automatically compile a large-scale dataset for this task, comprising of 1.8M mentions across 44 languages referring to over 10.9K events from Wikidata. We propose two variants of the event linking task: 1) multilingual, where event descriptions are from the same language as the mention, and 2) crosslingual, where all event descriptions are in English. On the two proposed tasks, we compare multiple event linking systems including BM25+ (Lv and Zhai, 2011) and multilingual adaptations of the biencoder and crossencoder architectures from BLINK (Wu et al., 2020). In our experiments on the two task variants, we find both biencoder and crossencoder models significantly outperform the BM25+ baseline. Our results also indicate that the crosslingual task is in general more challenging than the multilingual task. To test the out-of-domain generalization of the proposed linking systems, we additionally create a Wikinews-based evaluation set. We present qualitative analysis highlighting various aspects captured by the proposed dataset, including the need for temporal reasoning over context and tackling diverse event descriptions across languages.