MsPrompt: Multi-step Prompt Learning for Debiasing Few-shot Event
  Detection
Siyuan Wang Jianming Zheng Xuejun Hu Fei Cai Chengyu Song Xueshan Luo
Event detection (ED) is aimed to identify the key trigger words in
unstructured text and predict the event types accordingly. Traditional ED
models are too data-hungry to accommodate real applications with scarce labeled
data. Besides, typical ED models are facing the context-bypassing and disabled
generalization issues caused by the trigger bias stemming from ED datasets.
Therefore, we focus on the true few-shot paradigm to satisfy the low-resource
scenarios. In particular, we propose a multi-step prompt learning model
(MsPrompt) for debiasing few-shot event detection, that consists of the
following three components: an under-sampling module targeting to construct a
novel training set that accommodates the true few-shot setting, a multi-step
prompt module equipped with a knowledge-enhanced ontology to leverage the event
semantics and latent prior knowledge in the PLMs sufficiently for tackling the
context-bypassing problem, and a prototypical module compensating for the
weakness of classifying events with sparse data and boost the generalization
performance. Experiments on two public datasets ACE-2005 and FewEvent show that
MsPrompt can outperform the state-of-the-art models, especially in the strict
low-resource scenarios reporting 11.43% improvement in terms of weighted
F1-score against the best-performing baseline and achieving an outstanding
debiasing performance.