Domain Knowledge Empowered Structured Neural Net for End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction

Rujun Han, Yichao Zhou, Nanyun Peng


Abstract
Extracting event temporal relations is a critical task for information extraction and plays an important role in natural language understanding. Prior systems leverage deep learning and pre-trained language models to improve the performance of the task. However, these systems often suffer from two shortcomings: 1) when performing maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference based on neural models, previous systems only used structured knowledge that is assumed to be absolutely correct, i.e., hard constraints; 2) biased predictions on dominant temporal relations when training with a limited amount of data. To address these issues, we propose a framework that enhances deep neural network with distributional constraints constructed by probabilistic domain knowledge. We solve the constrained inference problem via Lagrangian Relaxation and apply it to end-to-end event temporal relation extraction tasks. Experimental results show our framework is able to improve the baseline neural network models with strong statistical significance on two widely used datasets in news and clinical domains.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.461
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5717–5729
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.461
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.461
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rujun Han, Yichao Zhou, and Nanyun Peng. 2020. Domain Knowledge Empowered Structured Neural Net for End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5717–5729, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain Knowledge Empowered Structured Neural Net for End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction (Han et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.461.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939236
Code
 rujunhan/EMNLP-2020