Abstract
In recent years, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global epidemic, and some efforts have been devoted to tracking and controlling its spread. Extracting structured knowledge from involved epidemic case reports can inform the surveillance system, which is important for controlling the spread of outbreaks. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the task of Chinese epidemic event extraction (EE), which is defined as the detection of epidemic-related events and corresponding arguments in the texts of epidemic case reports. To facilitate the research of this task, we first define the epidemic-related event types and argument roles. Then we manually annotate a Chinese COVID-19 epidemic dataset, named COVID-19 Case Report (CCR). We also propose a novel hierarchical EE architecture, named multi-model fusion-based hierarchical event extraction (MFHEE). In MFHEE, we introduce a multi-model fusion strategy to tackle the issue of recognition bias of previous EE models. The experimental results on CCR dataset show that our method can effectively extract epidemic events and outperforms other baselines on this dataset. The comparative experiments results on other generic datasets show that our method has good scalability and portability. The ablation studies also show that the proposed hierarchical structure and multi-model fusion strategy contribute to the precision of our model. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41019-022-00203-6.