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.
Previous information extraction (IE) systems are typically organized as a pipeline architecture of separated stages which make independent local decisions. When the data grows beyond some certain size, the extracted facts become inter-dependent and thus we can take advantage of information redundancy to conduct reasoning across documents and improve the performance of IE. We describe a joint inference approach based on information network structure to conduct cross-fact reasoning with an integer linear programming framework. Without using any additional labeled data this new method obtained 13.7 -24.4 user browsing cost reduction over a state-of-the-art IE system which extracts various types of facts independently. Traditional approaches to the task of ACE event extraction usually rely on sequential pipelines with multiple stages, which suffer from error propagation since event triggers and arguments are predicted in isolation by independent local classifiers. By contrast, we propose a joint framework based on structured prediction which extracts triggers and arguments together so that the local predictions can be mutually improved. In addition, we propose to incorporate global features which explicitly capture the dependencies of multiple triggers and arguments. Experimental results show that our joint approach with local features outperforms the pipelined baseline, and adding global features further improves the performance significantly. Our approach advances state-ofthe-art sentence-level event extraction, and even outperforms previous argument labeling methods which use external knowledge from other sentences and documents. 