Information Extraction with Differentiable Beam Search on Graph RNNs

Niama El Khbir, Nadi Tomeh, Thierry Charnois


Abstract
Information extraction (IE) from text documents is an important NLP task that includes entity, relation, and event extraction. These tasks are often addressed jointly as a graph generation problem, where entities and event triggers represent nodes and where relations and event arguments represent edges. Most existing systems use local classifiers for nodes and edges, trained using cross-entropy loss, and employ inference strategies such as beam search to approximate the optimal graph structure. These approaches typically suffer from exposure bias due to the discrepancy between training and decoding. In this paper, we tackle this problem by casting graph generation as auto-regressive sequence labeling and making its training aware of the decoding procedure by using a differentiable version of beam search. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments conducted on the ACE05 and ConLL04 datasets across diverse languages. Our experimental findings affirm that our model outperforms its non-decoding-aware version for all datasets employed. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies that emphasize the effectiveness of aligning training and inference. Additionally, we introduce a novel quantification of exposure bias within this context, providing valuable insights into the functioning of our model.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.796
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:
9084–9096
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.796
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niama El Khbir, Nadi Tomeh, and Thierry Charnois. 2024. Information Extraction with Differentiable Beam Search on Graph RNNs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 9084–9096, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Information Extraction with Differentiable Beam Search on Graph RNNs (El Khbir et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.796.pdf