REBEL: Relation Extraction By End-to-end Language generation

Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Roberto Navigli


Abstract
Extracting relation triplets from raw text is a crucial task in Information Extraction, enabling multiple applications such as populating or validating knowledge bases, factchecking, and other downstream tasks. However, it usually involves multiple-step pipelines that propagate errors or are limited to a small number of relation types. To overcome these issues, we propose the use of autoregressive seq2seq models. Such models have previously been shown to perform well not only in language generation, but also in NLU tasks such as Entity Linking, thanks to their framing as seq2seq tasks. In this paper, we show how Relation Extraction can be simplified by expressing triplets as a sequence of text and we present REBEL, a seq2seq model based on BART that performs end-to-end relation extraction for more than 200 different relation types. We show our model’s flexibility by fine-tuning it on an array of Relation Extraction and Relation Classification benchmarks, with it attaining state-of-the-art performance in most of them.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.204
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2370–2381
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.204
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.204
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot and Roberto Navigli. 2021. REBEL: Relation Extraction By End-to-end Language generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 2370–2381, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
REBEL: Relation Extraction By End-to-end Language generation (Huguet Cabot & Navigli, Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.204.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.204.mp4
Data
Adverse Drug Events (ADE) CorpusCoNLLCoNLL04DocREDNew York Times Annotated CorpusRe-TACRED