The essence of distantly supervised relation extraction is that it is an incomplete multi-label classification problem with sparse and noisy features. To tackle the sparsity and noise challenges, we propose solving the classification problem using matrix completion on factorized matrix of minimized rank. We formulate relation classification as completing the unknown labels of testing items (entity pairs) in a sparse matrix that concatenates training and testing textual features with training labels. Our algorithmic framework is based on the assumption that the rank of item-by-feature and item-by-label joint matrix is low. We apply two optimization models to recover the underlying low-rank matrix leveraging the sparsity of feature-label matrix. The matrix completion problem is then solved by the fixed point continuation (FPC) algorithm, which can find the global optimum. Experiments on two widely used datasets with different dimensions of textual features demonstrate that our low-rank matrix completion approach significantly outperforms the baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.
The idea of distant supervision was firstly proposed in the field of bioinformatics @cite_2 . used WordNet as the knowledge base to discover more hpyernym hyponym relations between entities from news articles. However, either bioinformatic database or WordNet is maintained by a few experts, thus hardly kept up-to-date.
@cite_2
1604644367 2149713870 2251775380 2604610161
Several recent works on relation extraction have been applying the distant supervision paradigm: instead of relying on annotated text to learn how to predict relations, they employ existing knowledge bases (KBs) as source of supervision. Crucially, these approaches are trained based on the assumption that each sentence which mentions the two related entities is an expression of the given relation. Here we argue that this leads to noisy patterns that hurt precision, in particular if the knowledge base is not directly related to the text we are working with. We present a novel approach to distant supervision that can alleviate this problem based on the following two ideas: First, we use a factor graph to explicitly model the decision whether two entities are related, and the decision whether this relation is mentioned in a given sentence; second, we apply constraint-driven semi-supervision to train this model without any knowledge about which sentences express the relations in our training KB. We apply our approach to extract relations from the New York Times corpus and use Freebase as knowledge base. When compared to a state-of-the-art approach for relation extraction under distant supervision, we achieve 31 error reduction. In relation extraction, distant supervision seeks to extract relations between entities from text by using a knowledge base, such as Freebase, as a source of supervision. When a sentence and a knowledge base refer to the same entity pair, this approach heuristically labels the sentence with the corresponding relation in the knowledge base. However, this heuristic can fail with the result that some sentences are labeled wrongly. This noisy labeled data causes poor extraction performance. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the number of wrong labels. We present a novel generative model that directly models the heuristic labeling process of distant supervision. The model predicts whether assigned labels are correct or wrong via its hidden variables. Our experimental results show that this model detected wrong labels with higher performance than baseline methods. In the experiment, we also found that our wrong label reduction boosted the performance of relation extraction. Distant supervision is a successful paradigm that gathers training data for information extraction systems by automatically aligning vast databases of facts with text. Previous work has demonstrated its usefulness for the extraction of binary relations such as a person’s employer or a film’s director. Here, we extend the distant supervision approach to template-based event extraction, focusing on the extraction of passenger counts, aircraft types, and other facts concerning airplane crash events. We present a new publicly available dataset and event extraction task in the plane crash domain based on Wikipedia infoboxes and newswire text. Using this dataset, we conduct a preliminary evaluation of four distantly supervised extraction models which assign named entity mentions in text to entries in the event template. Our results indicate that joint inference over sequences of candidate entity mentions is beneficial. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the SEARN algorithm outperforms a linear-chain CRF and strong baselines with local inference. Distant supervision for relation extraction is an efficient method to scale relation extraction to very large corpora which contains thousands of relations. However, the existing approaches have flaws on selecting valid instances and lack of background knowledge about the entities. In this paper, we propose a sentence-level attention model to select the valid instances, which makes full use of the supervision information from knowledge bases. And we extract entity descriptions from Freebase and Wikipedia pages to supplement background knowledge for our task. The background knowledge not only provides more information for predicting relations, but also brings better entity representations for the attention module. We conduct three experiments on a widely used dataset and the experimental results show that our approach outperforms all the baseline systems significantly.