P4E: Few-Shot Event Detection as Prompt-Guided Identification and Localization

Abstract: We propose P4E, an identify-and-localize event detection framework that integrates the best of few-shot prompting and structured prediction. Our framework decomposes event detection into an identification task and a localization task. For the identification task, which we formulate as multi-label classification, we leverage cloze-based prompting to align our objective with the pre-training task of LLMs, allowing our model to quickly adapt to new event types. We then employ an event type-agnostic sequence labeling model to localize the event trigger conditioned on the identification output. This heterogeneous model design allows P4E to quickly learn new event types without sacrificing the ability to make structured predictions. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design, and P4E shows superior performance for few-shot event detection on benchmark datasets FewEvent and MAVEN and comparable performance to SOTA for fully-supervised event detection on ACE.