A Survey of the Application of Neural Networks to Event Extraction

Event extraction is an important part of natural language information extraction, and it’s widely employed in other natural language processing tasks including question answering and machine reading comprehension. However, there is a lack of recent comprehensive survey papers on event extraction. In the past few years, numerous high-quality and innovative event extraction methods have been proposed, making it necessary to consolidate these new developments with previous work in order to provide a clear overview for researchers and serve as a reference for future studies. In addition, event detection is a fundamental sub-task in event extraction, previous survey papers have often overlooked the related work on event detection. Therefore, this paper aims to bridge these gaps by presenting a comprehensive survey of event extraction, including recent advancements and an analysis of previous research on event detection. The resources for event extraction are first introduced in this research, and then the numerous neural network models currently employed in event extraction tasks are divided into four types: word sequence-based methods, graph-based neural network methods, external knowledge-based approaches, and prompt-based approaches. We compare and contrast them in depth, pointing out the flaws and difficulties with existing research. Finally, we discuss the future of event extraction development.