Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction

Zhen Wan, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Fei Cheng, Sadao Kurohashi, Jiwei Li


Abstract
Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using k nearest neighbors (kNN-RE). kNN-RE allows the model to consult training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the two issues above. Additionally, we observe that kNN-RE serves as an effective way to leverage distant supervision (DS) data for RE. Experimental results show that the proposed kNN-RE achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of supervised RE datasets, i.e., ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80, along with outperforming the best model to date on the i2b2 and Wiki80 datasets in the setting of allowing using DS. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/kNN-RE.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.113
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1731–1738
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.113
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.113
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhen Wan, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Fei Cheng, Sadao Kurohashi, and Jiwei Li. 2022. Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1731–1738, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction (Wan et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.113.pdf