Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction

Traditional event extraction methods require predefined event types and their corresponding annotations to learn event extractors. These prerequisites are often hard to be satisfied in real-world applications. This work presents a corpus-based open-domain event type induction method that automatically discovers a set of event types from a given corpus. As events of the same type could be expressed in multiple ways, we propose to represent each event type as a cluster of predicate sense, object head pairs. Specifically, our method (1) selects salient predicates and object heads, (2) disambiguates predicate senses using only a verb sense dictionary, and (3) obtains event types by jointly embedding and clustering predicate sense, object head pairs in a latent spherical space. Our experiments, on three datasets from different domains, show our method can discover salient and high-quality event types, according to both automatic and human evaluations 1 .