Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference

Liang Zhang, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen, Zhongjian Miao, Min Zijun, Qingguo Hu, Xiaodong Shi


Abstract
Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to extract the relations between entities from the input document that usually containing many difficultly-predicted entity pairs whose relations can only be predicted through relational inference. Existing methods usually directly predict the relations of all entity pairs of input document in a one-pass manner, ignoring the fact that predictions of some entity pairs heavily depend on the predicted results of other pairs. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel document-level RE model with iterative inference. Our model is mainly composed of two modules: 1) a base module expected to provide preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs; 2) an inference module introduced to refine these preliminary predictions by iteratively dealing with difficultly-predicted entity pairs depending on other pairs in an easy-to-hard manner. Unlike previous methods which only consider feature information of entity pairs, our inference module is equipped with two Extended Cross Attention units, allowing it to exploit both feature information and previous predictions of entity pairs during relational inference. Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage strategy to train our model. At the first stage, we only train our base module. During the second stage, we train the whole model, where contrastive learning is introduced to enhance the training of inference module. Experimental results on three commonly-used datasets show that our model consistently outperforms other competitive baselines.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.568
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:
8306–8317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.568
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.568
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liang Zhang, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen, Zhongjian Miao, Min Zijun, Qingguo Hu, and Xiaodong Shi. 2022. Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8306–8317, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.568.pdf