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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Broad-coverage relation extraction either requires expensive supervised training data, or suffers from drawbacks inherent to distant supervision. We present an approach for providing partial supervision to a distantly supervised relation extractor using a small number of carefully selected examples. We compare against established active learning criteria and propose a novel criterion to sample examples which are both uncertain and representative. In this way, we combine the benefits of fine-grained supervision for difficult examples with the coverage of a large distantly supervised corpus. Our approach gives a substantial increase of 3.9 endto-end F1 on the 2013 KBP Slot Filling evaluation, yielding a net F1 of 37.7 . 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 new approach to relation extraction that requires only a handful of training examples. Given a few pairs of named entities known to exhibit or not exhibit a particular relation, bags of sentences containing the pairs are extracted from the web. We extend an existing relation extraction method to handle this weaker form of supervision, and present experimental results demonstrating that our approach can reliably extract relations from web documents. This paper describes the design and implementation of the slot filling system prepared by Stanford’s natural language processing group for the 2010 Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track at the Text Analysis Conference (TAC). Our system relies on a simple distant supervision approach using mainly resources furnished by the track organizers: we used slot examples from the provided knowledge base, which we mapped to documents from several corpora, i.e., those distributed by the organizers, Wikipedia, and web snippets. Our implementation attained the median rank among all participating systems. Distant supervision has attracted recent interest for training information extraction systems because it does not require any human annotation but rather employs existing knowledge bases to heuristically label a training corpus. However, previous work has failed to address the problem of false negative training examples mislabeled due to the incompleteness of knowledge bases. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple yet novel framework that combines a passage retrieval model using coarse features into a state-of-the-art relation extractor using multi-instance learning with fine features. We adapt the information retrieval technique of pseudorelevance feedback to expand knowledge bases, assuming entity pairs in top-ranked passages are more likely to express a relation. Our proposed technique significantly improves the quality of distantly supervised relation extraction, boosting recall from 47.7 to 61.2 with a consistently high level of precision of around 93 in the experiments. Distant supervision usually utilizes only unlabeled data and existing knowledge bases to learn relation extraction models. However, in some cases a small amount of human labeled data is available. In this paper, we demonstrate how a state-of-theart multi-instance multi-label model can be modified to make use of these reliable sentence-level labels in addition to the relation-level distant supervision from a database. Experiments show that our approach achieves a statistically significant increase of 13.5 in F-score and 37 in area under the precision recall curve. Distant supervision for relation extraction (RE) -- gathering training data by aligning a database of facts with text -- is an efficient approach to scale RE to thousands of different relations. However, this introduces a challenging learning scenario where the relation expressed by a pair of entities found in a sentence is unknown. For example, a sentence containing Balzac and France may express BornIn or Died, an unknown relation, or no relation at all. Because of this, traditional supervised learning, which assumes that each example is explicitly mapped to a label, is not appropriate. We propose a novel approach to multi-instance multi-label learning for RE, which jointly models all the instances of a pair of entities in text and all their labels using a graphical model with latent variables. Our model performs competitively on two difficult domains. Modern models of relation extraction for tasks like ACE are based on supervised learning of relations from small hand-labeled corpora. We investigate an alternative paradigm that does not require labeled corpora, avoiding the domain dependence of ACE-style algorithms, and allowing the use of corpora of any size. Our experiments use Freebase, a large semantic database of several thousand relations, to provide distant supervision. For each pair of entities that appears in some Freebase relation, we find all sentences containing those entities in a large unlabeled corpus and extract textual features to train a relation classifier. Our algorithm combines the advantages of supervised IE (combining 400,000 noisy pattern features in a probabilistic classifier) and unsupervised IE (extracting large numbers of relations from large corpora of any domain). Our model is able to extract 10,000 instances of 102 relations at a precision of 67.6 . We also analyze feature performance, showing that syntactic parse features are particularly helpful for relations that are ambiguous or lexically distant in their expression. 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. Two problems arise when using distant supervision for relation extraction. First, in this method, an already existing knowledge base is heuristically aligned to texts, and the alignment results are treated as labeled data. However, the heuristic alignment can fail, resulting in wrong label problem. In addition, in previous approaches, statistical models have typically been applied to ad hoc features. The noise that originates from the feature extraction process can cause poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model dubbed the Piecewise Convolutional Neural Networks (PCNNs) with multi-instance learning to address these two problems. To solve the first problem, distant supervised relation extraction is treated as a multi-instance problem in which the uncertainty of instance labels is taken into account. To address the latter problem, we avoid feature engineering and instead adopt convolutional architecture with piecewise max pooling to automatically learn relevant features. Experiments show that our method is effective and outperforms several competitive baseline methods. Information extraction (IE) holds the promise of generating a large-scale knowledge base from the Web's natural language text. Knowledge-based weak supervision, using structured data to heuristically label a training corpus, works towards this goal by enabling the automated learning of a potentially unbounded number of relation extractors. Recently, researchers have developed multi-instance learning algorithms to combat the noisy training data that can come from heuristic labeling, but their models assume relations are disjoint --- for example they cannot extract the pair Founded(Jobs, Apple) and CEO-of(Jobs, Apple). This paper presents a novel approach for multi-instance learning with overlapping relations that combines a sentence-level extraction model with a simple, corpus-level component for aggregating the individual facts. We apply our model to learn extractors for NY Times text using weak supervision from Free-base. Experiments show that the approach runs quickly and yields surprising gains in accuracy, at both the aggregate and sentence level.