Detecting events and classifying them into predefined types is an important step in knowledge extraction from natural language texts. While the neural network models have generally led the state-of-the-art, the differences in performance between different architectures have not been rigorously studied. In this paper we present a novel GRU-based model that combines syntactic information along with temporal structure through an attention mechanism. We show that it is competitive with other neural network architectures through empirical evaluations under different random initializations and training-validation-test splits of ACE2005 dataset.
We study the event detection problem using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that overcome the two fundamental limitations of the traditional feature-based approaches to this task: complicated feature engineering for rich feature sets and error propagation from the preceding stages which generate these features. The experimental results show that the CNNs outperform the best reported feature-based systems in the general setting as well as the domain adaptation setting without resorting to extensive external resources. Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different "thinned" networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.