Multilingual SubEvent Relation Extraction: A Novel Dataset and Structure Induction Method

Subevent Relation Extraction (SRE) is a task in Information Extraction that aims to recognize spatial and temporal containment relations between event mentions in text. Recent methods have utilized pre-trained language models to represent input texts for SRE. However, a key issue in existing SRE methods is the employment of sequential order of words in texts to feed into representation learning methods, thus unable to explicitly focus on important context words and their interactions to enhance representations. In this work, we introduce a new method for SRE that learns to induce effective graph structures for input texts to boost representation learning. Our method features a word alignment framework with dependency paths and optimal transport to identify important context words to form effective graph structures for SRE. In addition, to enable SRE research on non-English languages, we present a new multilingual SRE dataset for five typologically different languages. Extensive experiments reveal the state-of-the-art performance for our method on different datasets and languages.