L-APPLE: Language-agnostic Prototype Prefix Learning for Cross-lingual Event Detection

Cross-lingual event detection (CLED) is a challenging information extraction task in which a model is trained in one language and evaluated in another. Most recent methods attack CLED by aligning source and target language representations based on fine-tuning multilingual pre-trained language models. However, they need to modify all the model parameters and store a complete copy for each source-target language pair, which is resource-intensive and requires significant memory. In contrast, prefix-tuning is a more lightweight alternative, but it relies solely on the labeled source language data during training, limiting its performance. To address the above problems, we propose a novel framework for CLED with Language-agnostic Prototypical Prefix-Learning (L-APPLE), which can integrate language-agnostic event information with prefix-tuning. In detail, inspired by vanilla prompt methods, L-APPLE divides the prefix into two parts: one optimized as continuous word embeddings while the other generated with cross-lingual aligned event prototypes. Meanwhile, we employ language alignment with contrastive learning to acquire cross-lingual aligned event prototypes, and finally, parameters are optimized using both task and alignment loss. The evaluation of public CLED benchmarks demonstrates that L-APPLE achieves significant improvements in CLED with only less than 0.1% of the parameters optimized compared to previous fine-tuning methods.