We consider the task of detecting contractual obligations and prohibitions. We show that a self-attention mechanism improves the performance of a BILSTM classifier, the previous state of the art for this task, by allowing it to focus on indicative tokens. We also introduce a hierarchical BILSTM, which converts each sentence to an embedding, and processes the sentence embeddings to classify each sentence. Apart from being faster to train, the hierarchical BILSTM outperforms the flat one, even when the latter considers surrounding sentences, because the hierarchical model has a broader discourse view.
In previous work @cite_11 @cite_5 we focused on extracting contract elements (e.g., contractor names, legislation references, start and end dates, amounts), a task which is similar to named entity recognition. The best results were obtained by stacked s @cite_12 or stacked - models @cite_17 ; hierarchical s were not considered. By contrast, in this paper we considered obligation and prohibition extraction, treating it as a sentence (or clause) classification task, and showing the benefits of employing a hierarchical model that considers both the sequence of words in each sentence and the sequence of sentences.
@cite_5 @cite_17 @cite_12 @cite_11
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We present a novel approach to relation extraction that integrates information across documents, performs global inference and requires no labelled text. In particular, we tackle relation extraction and entity identification jointly. We use distant supervision to train a factor graph model for relation extraction based on an existing knowledge base (Freebase, derived in parts from Wikipedia). For inference we run an efficient Gibbs sampler that leads to linear time joint inference. We evaluate our approach both for an indomain (Wikipedia) and a more realistic out-of-domain (New York Times Corpus) setting. For the in-domain setting, our joint model leads to 4 higher precision than an isolated local approach, but has no advantage over a pipeline. For the out-of-domain data, we benefit strongly from joint modelling, and observe improvements in precision of 13 over the pipeline, and 15 over the isolated baseline. 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. We present a novel end-to-end neural model to extract entities and relations between them. Our recurrent neural network based model captures both word sequence and dependency tree substructure information by stacking bidirectional tree-structured LSTM-RNNs on bidirectional sequential LSTM-RNNs. This allows our model to jointly represent both entities and relations with shared parameters in a single model. We further encourage detection of entities during training and use of entity information in relation extraction via entity pretraining and scheduled sampling. Our model improves over the state-of-the-art feature-based model on end-to-end relation extraction, achieving 12.1 and 5.7 relative error reductions in F1-score on ACE2005 and ACE2004, respectively. We also show that our LSTM-RNN based model compares favorably to the state-of-the-art CNN based model (in F1-score) on nominal relation classification (SemEval-2010 Task 8). Finally, we present an extensive ablation analysis of several model components. 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.