Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Pengda Qin, Weiran Xu, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Distant supervision has become the standard method for relation extraction. However, even though it is an efficient method, it does not come at no cost—The resulted distantly-supervised training samples are often very noisy. To combat the noise, most of the recent state-of-the-art approaches focus on selecting one-best sentence or calculating soft attention weights over the set of the sentences of one specific entity pair. However, these methods are suboptimal, and the false positive problem is still a key stumbling bottleneck for the performance. We argue that those incorrectly-labeled candidate sentences must be treated with a hard decision, rather than being dealt with soft attention weights. To do this, our paper describes a radical solution—We explore a deep reinforcement learning strategy to generate the false-positive indicator, where we automatically recognize false positives for each relation type without any supervised information. Unlike the removal operation in the previous studies, we redistribute them into the negative examples. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
Anthology ID:
P18-1199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2137–2147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1199
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1199
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengda Qin, Weiran Xu, and William Yang Wang. 2018. Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2137–2147, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning (Qin et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1199.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1199.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1199.mp4
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