Event-Arguments Extraction Corpus and Modeling using BERT for Arabic

Event-argument extraction is a challenging task, particularly in Arabic due to sparse linguistic resources. To fill this gap, we introduce the corpus (550k tokens) as an extension of Wojood, enriched with event-argument annotations. We used three types of event arguments, agent, location, and date, which we annotated as relation types. Our inter-annotator agreement evaluation resulted in 82.23% Kappa score and 87.2% F1-score. Additionally, we propose a novel method for event relation extraction using BERT, in which we treat the task as text entailment. This method achieves an $F_1$-score of 94.01{%}.To further evaluate the generalization of our proposed method, we collected and annotated another out-of-domain corpus (about 80k tokens) called and used it as a second test set, on which our approach achieved promising results (83.59{%} $F_1$-score). Last but not least, we propose an end-to-end system for event-arguments extraction. This system is implemented as part of SinaTools, and both corpora are publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood.

Association for Computational Linguistics