Modeling skip-grams for event detection with convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved the top performance for event detection due to their capacity to induce the underlying structures of the k-grams in the sentences. However, the current CNN-based event detectors only model the consecutive k-grams and ignore the non-consecutive kgrams that might involve important structures for event detection. In this work, we propose to improve the current CNN models for ED by introducing the non-consecutive convolution. Our systematic evaluation on both the general setting and the domain adaptation setting demonstrates the effectiveness of the nonconsecutive CNN model, leading to the significant performance improvement over the current state-of-the-art systems.