Augmenting Trigger Semantics to Improve Event Coreference Resolution

Due to the small size of the annotated corpora and the sparsity of the event trigger words, the event coreference resolver cannot capture enough event semantics, especially the trigger semantics, to identify coreferential event mentions. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a trigger semantics augmentation mechanism to boost event coreference resolution. First, this mechanism performs a trigger-oriented masking strategy to pre-train a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)-based encoder (Trigger-BERT), which is fine-tuned on a large-scale unlabeled dataset Gigaword. Second, it combines the event semantic relations from the Trigger-BERT encoder with the event interactions from the soft-attention mechanism to resolve event coreference. Experimental results on both the KBP2016 and KBP2017 datasets show that our proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.