Make It Directly: Event Extraction Based on Tree-LSTM and Bi-GRU

Event extraction is an important research direction in the field of natural language processing (NLP) applications including information retrieval (IR). Traditional event extraction is realized with two methods: the pipeline and the joint extraction methods. The pipeline method determines the event by triggering word recognition to further implement event extraction and is prone to error cascading. The joint extraction method applies deep learning to implement the completion of the trigger word and the argument role classification task. Most studies with the joint extraction method adopt the CNN or RNN network structure. However, in the case of event extraction, deeper understanding of complex contexts is required. Existing studies do not make full use of syntactic relations. This paper proposes a novel event extraction model, which is built upon a Tree-LSTM network and a Bi-GRU network and carries syntactically related information. It is illustrated that this method simultaneously uses Tree-LSTM and Bi-GRU to obtain a representation of the candidate event sentence and identify the event type, which results in a better performance compared to the ones that use chain structured LSTM, CNN or only Tree-LSTM. Finally, the hidden state of each node is used in Tree-LSTM to predict a label for candidate arguments and identify/classify all arguments of an event. Lab results show that the proposed event extraction model achieves competitive results compared to previous works.