A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction
Wanlong Liu, Enqi Zhang, Shaohuan Cheng, Dingyi Zeng, Li Zhou, Chen Zhang, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
Abstract
Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from the memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{liu-etal-2025-compressive,
title = "A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction",
author = "Liu, Wanlong and
Zhang, Enqi and
Cheng, Shaohuan and
Zeng, Dingyi and
Zhou, Li and
Zhang, Chen and
Zhang, Malu and
Chen, Wenyu",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.85/",
pages = "1278--1293"
}