Reading the Manual: Event Extraction as Definition Comprehension

We ask whether text understanding has progressed to where we may extract event information through incremental refinement of bleached statements derived from annotation manuals. Such a capability would allow for the trivial construction and extension of an extraction framework by intended end-users through declarations such as, Some person was born in some location at some time. We introduce an example of a model that employs such statements, with experiments illustrating we can extract events under closed ontologies and generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new definitions. ea rl ie r in th e w ee k someone AGENT 1 killed someone else VICTIM 2 with something INSTRUMENT 3 in some place PLACE 4 at some time