EventBERT: Incorporating Event-Based Semantics for Natural Language Understanding

Abstract

Natural language understanding tasks require a comprehensive understanding of natural language and further reasoning about it, on the basis of holistic information at different levels to gain comprehensive knowledge. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PrLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language understanding. However, they rely mainly on extracting context-sensitive statistical patterns without explicitly modeling linguistic information, such as semantic relationships entailed in natural language. In this work, we propose EventBERT, an event-based semantic representation model that takes BERT as the backbone and refines with event-based structural semantics in terms of graph convolution networks. EventBERT benefits simultaneously from rich event-based structures embodied in the graph and contextual semantics learned in pre-trained model BERT. Experimental results on the GLUE benchmark show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the baseline model.