Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention
Jiawei Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Abstract
Event detection has long been troubled by the trigger curse: overfitting the trigger will harm the generalization ability while underfitting it will hurt the detection performance. This problem is even more severe in few-shot scenario. In this paper, we identify and solve the trigger curse problem in few-shot event detection (FSED) from a causal view. By formulating FSED with a structural causal model (SCM), we found that the trigger is a confounder of the context and the result, which makes previous FSED methods much easier to overfit triggers. To resolve this problem, we propose to intervene on the context via backdoor adjustment during training. Experiments show that our method significantly improves the FSED on both ACE05 and MAVEN datasets.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chen-etal-2021-honey,
title = "Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention",
author = "Chen, Jiawei and
Lin, Hongyu and
Han, Xianpei and
Sun, Le",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.637/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.637",
pages = "8078--8088"
}