CaDRL: Document-level Relation Extraction via Context-aware Differentiable Rule Learning

Kunli Zhang, Pengcheng Wu, Bohan Yu, Kejun Wu, Aoze Zheng, Xiyang Huang, Chenkang Zhu, Min Peng, Hongying Zan, Yu Song


Abstract
Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations from documents. Compared with sentence-level relation extraction, it is necessary to extract long-distance dependencies. Existing methods enhance the output of trained DocRE models either by learning logical rules or by extracting rules from annotated data and then injecting them into the model. However, these approaches can result in suboptimal performance due to incorrect rule set constraints. To mitigate this issue, we propose Context-aware differentiable rule learning or CaDRL for short, a novel differentiable rule-based framework that learns the doc-specific logical rule to avoid generating suboptimal constraints. Specifically, we utilize Transformer-based relation attention to encode document and relation information, thereby learning the contextual information of the relation. We employ a sequence-generated differentiable rule decoder to generate relational probabilistic logic rules at each reasoning step. We also introduce a parameter sharing training mechanism in CaDRL to reconcile the DocRE model and the rule learning module. Extensive experimental results on three DocRE datasets demonstrate that CaDRL outperforms existing rule-based frameworks, significantly improving DocRE performance and making predictions more interpretable and logical.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.551
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
8272–8284
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.551/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Kunli Zhang, Pengcheng Wu, Bohan Yu, Kejun Wu, Aoze Zheng, Xiyang Huang, Chenkang Zhu, Min Peng, Hongying Zan, and Yu Song. 2025. CaDRL: Document-level Relation Extraction via Context-aware Differentiable Rule Learning. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8272–8284, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CaDRL: Document-level Relation Extraction via Context-aware Differentiable Rule Learning (Zhang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.551.pdf