Unsupervised Relation Extraction from Language Models using Constrained Cloze Completion

Ankur Goswami, Akshata Bhat, Hadar Ohana, Theodoros Rekatsinas


Abstract
We show that state-of-the-art self-supervised language models can be readily used to extract relations from a corpus without the need to train a fine-tuned extractive head. We introduce RE-Flex, a simple framework that performs constrained cloze completion over pretrained language models to perform unsupervised relation extraction. RE-Flex uses contextual matching to ensure that language model predictions matches supporting evidence from the input corpus that is relevant to a target relation. We perform an extensive experimental study over multiple relation extraction benchmarks and demonstrate that RE-Flex outperforms competing unsupervised relation extraction methods based on pretrained language models by up to 27.8 F1 points compared to the next-best method. Our results show that constrained inference queries against a language model can enable accurate unsupervised relation extraction.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.113
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1263–1276
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.113
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.113
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ankur Goswami, Akshata Bhat, Hadar Ohana, and Theodoros Rekatsinas. 2020. Unsupervised Relation Extraction from Language Models using Constrained Cloze Completion. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1263–1276, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Relation Extraction from Language Models using Constrained Cloze Completion (Goswami et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.113.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.findings-emnlp.113.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Data
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