Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Xin Sun, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Zilei Wang, Liang Wang


Abstract
Distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) aims to extract relational facts from texts but suffers from noisy instances. To mitigate the influence of noisy labels, current methods typically use the Multi-Instance-Learning framework to extract relations for each bag. However, these approaches are not capable of extracting relation labels for individual sentences. Several studies have focused on sentence-level DSRE to solve the above problem. These studies primarily aim to develop methods for identifying noisy samples and filtering them out to mitigate the impact of noise. However, discarding noisy samples directly leads to the loss of useful information. To this end, we propose SSLRE, a novel Semi-Supervised-Learning Relation Extraction framework for sentence-level DSRE. We discard only the labels of the noisy samples and utilize these instances without labels as unlabeled samples. Our SSLRE framework utilizes a weighted K-NN graph to select confident samples as labeled data and the rest as unlabeled. We then design a robust semi-supervised learning framework that can efficiently handle remaining label noise present in the labeled dataset, while also making effective use of unlabeled samples. Based on our experiments on two real-world datasets, the SSLRE framework we proposed has achieved significant enhancements in sentence-level relation extraction performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, it has also attained a state-of-the-art level of performance in bag-level relation extraction with ONE aggregation strategy.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.876
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13145–13157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.876
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.876
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xin Sun, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Zilei Wang, and Liang Wang. 2023. Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 13145–13157, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (Sun et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.876.pdf