Small Models Are (Still) Effective Cross-Domain Argument Extractors

Effective ontology transfer has been a major goal of recent work on event argument extraction (EAE). Two methods in particular – question answering (QA) and template infilling (TI) – have emerged as promising approaches to this problem. However, detailed explorations of these techniques’ ability to actually enable this transfer are lacking. In this work, we provide such a study, exploring zero-shot transfer using both techniques on six major EAE datasets at both the sentence and document levels. Further, we challenge the growing reliance on LLMs for zero-shot extraction, showing that vastly smaller models trained on an appropriate source ontology can yield zero-shot performance superior to that of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4.