Most supervised systems of event detection (ED) task reply heavily on manual annotations and suffer from high-cost human effort when applied to new event types. To tackle this general problem, we turn our attention to few-shot learning (FSL). As a typical solution to FSL, cross-modal feature generation based frameworks achieve promising performance on images classification, which inspires us to advance this approach to ED task. In this work, we propose a model which extracts latent semantic

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... ures from event mentions, type structures and type names, then these three modalities are mapped into a shared low-dimension latent space by modality-specific aligned variational autoencoder enhanced by adversarial training. We evaluate the quality of our latent representations by training a CNN classifier to perform ED task. Experiments conducted on ACE2005 dataset show an improvement with 12.67% on F1-score when introducing adversarial training to VAE model, and our method is comparable with existing transfer learning framework for ED.