Abstract Relation extraction is the task of identifying predefined relationship between entities, and plays an essential role in information extraction, knowledge base construction, question answering and so on. Most existing relation extractors make predictions for each entity pair locally and individually, while ignoring implicit global clues available across different entity pairs and in the knowledge base, which often leads to conflicts among local predictions from different entity pairs. This paper proposes a joint inference framework that employs such global clues to resolve disagreements among local predictions. We exploit two kinds of clues to generate constraints which can capture the implicit type and cardinality requirements of a relation. Those constraints can be examined in either hard style or soft style, both of which can be effectively explored in an integer linear program formulation. Experimental results on both English and Chinese datasets show that our proposed framework can effectively utilize those two categories of global clues and resolve the disagreements among local predictions, thus improve various relation extractors when such clues are applicable to the datasets. Our experiments also indicate that the clues learnt automatically from existing knowledge bases perform comparably to or better than those refined by human.
Distant supervision (DS) is a semi-supervised relation extraction framework, which can automatically construct training data by aligning the triples in a KB to the sentences which contain their subjects and objects, and this learning paradigm has attracted much attention in information extraction tasks @cite_8 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_29 @cite_20 @cite_2 @cite_25 @cite_5 . DS approaches can predict canonicalized relations (predefined in a KB) for large amount of data and do not need much human involvement. Since the automatically generated training datasets in DS often contain noises, there are also research efforts focusing on reducing the noisy labels in the training data @cite_33 @cite_0 , or utilizing human annotated data to improve the performance @cite_19 @cite_13 . Most of the above works put their emphasis on resolving or reducing the noises in the DS training data, but mostly focus on the extraction models themselves, i.e., improving the local extractors, while ignoring the inconsistencies among many local predictions.
@cite_13 @cite_33 @cite_8 @cite_29 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_25 @cite_20
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Distant supervision (DS) is an appealing learning method which learns from existing relational facts to extract more from a text corpus. However, the accuracy is still not satisfying. In this paper, we point out and analyze some critical factors in DS which have great impact on accuracy, including valid entity type detection, negative training examples construction and ensembles. We propose an approach to handle these factors. By experimenting on Wikipedia articles to extract the facts in Freebase (the top 92 relations), we show the impact of these three factors on the accuracy of DS and the remarkable improvement led by the proposed approach. In this paper, we extend distant supervision (DS) based on Wikipedia for Relation Extraction (RE) by considering (i) relations defined in external repositories, e.g. YAGO, and (ii) any subset of Wikipedia documents. We show that training data constituted by sentences containing pairs of named entities in target relations is enough to produce reliable supervision. Our experiments with state-of-the-art relation extraction models, trained on the above data, show a meaningful F1 of 74.29 on a manually annotated test set: this highly improves the state-of-art in RE using DS. Additionally, our end-to-end experiments demonstrated that our extractors can be applied to any general text document. 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. Distant supervision, a paradigm of relation extraction where training data is created by aligning facts in a database with a large unannotated corpus, is an attractive approach for training relation extractors. Various models are proposed in recent literature to align the facts in the database to their mentions in the corpus. In this paper, we discuss and critically analyse a popular alignment strategy called the “at least one” heuristic. We provide a simple, yet effective relaxation to this strategy. We formulate the inference procedures in training as integer linear programming (ILP) problems and implement the relaxation to the “at least one ” heuristic via a soft constraint in this formulation. Empirically, we demonstrate that this simple strategy leads to a better performance under certain settings over the existing approaches.