A KNOWLEDGE/DATA ENHANCED METHOD FOR JOINT EVENT AND TEMPORAL RELATION EXTRACTION

Understanding temporal relations (TempRels) between events is an important task that could benefit many downstream NLP applications. This task inevitably faces the challenges of both a limited amount of high-quality training data and a very biased distribution of TempRels. These problems will substantially hurt the performance of extraction systems because they are inclined to predict dominant TempRels when training with a limited amount of data. To alleviate those issues, we propose a Knowledge/Data Enhanced method for Event and TempRel Extraction, which integrates the temporal commonsense knowledge, data augmentation and Focal Loss function into one single extraction system. Altogether, these components improve the performance of the system on two public benchmark datasets TB-Dense and MATRES.