Building a Japanese Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset Assisted by Cross-Lingual Transfer

Youmi Ma, An Wang, Naoaki Okazaki


Abstract
Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) is the task of extracting all semantic relationships from a document. While studies have been conducted on English DocRE, limited attention has been given to DocRE in non-English languages. This work delves into effectively utilizing existing English resources to promote DocRE studies in non-English languages, with Japanese as the representative case. As an initial attempt, we construct a dataset by transferring an English dataset to Japanese. However, models trained on such a dataset are observed to suffer from low recalls. We investigate the error cases and attribute the failure to different surface structures and semantics of documents translated from English and those written by native speakers. We thus switch to explore if the transferred dataset can assist human annotation on Japanese documents. In our proposal, annotators edit relation predictions from a model trained on the transferred dataset. Quantitative analysis shows that relation recommendations suggested by the model help reduce approximately 50% of the human edit steps compared with the previous approach. Experiments quantify the performance of existing DocRE models on our collected dataset, portraying the challenges of Japanese and cross-lingual DocRE.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.232
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2567–2579
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.232
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Youmi Ma, An Wang, and Naoaki Okazaki. 2024. Building a Japanese Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset Assisted by Cross-Lingual Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2567–2579, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Building a Japanese Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset Assisted by Cross-Lingual Transfer (Ma et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.232.pdf