Hyeonjeong Ha, Qiusi Zhan, Jeonghwan Kim, Dimitrios Bralios, Saikrishna Sanniboina, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Daniel Kang, Heng Ji. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The progress of event extraction research has been hindered by the absence of wide-coverage, large-scale datasets.To make event extraction systems more accessible, we build a generalpurpose event detection dataset GLEN which covers 205K event mentions with 3,465 different types, making it more than 20x larger in ontology than today's largest event dataset.GLEN is created by utilizing the DWD Overlay, which provides a mapping between Wikidata Qnodes and PropBank rolesets.This enables us to use the abundant existing annotation for PropBank as distant supervision.In addition, we also propose a new multi-stage event detection model CEDAR specifically designed to handle the large ontology size in GLEN.We show that our model exhibits superior performance compared to a range of baselines including InstructGPT.Finally, we perform error analysis and show that label noise is still the largest challenge for improving performance for this new dataset. 1

Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe.