The advent of neural-networks in NLP brought with it substantial improvements in supervised relation extraction. However, obtaining a sufficient quantity of training data remains a key challenge. In this work we propose a process for bootstrapping training datasets which can be performed quickly by non-NLP-experts. We take advantage of search engines over syntactic-graphs (Such as Shlain et al. (2020)) which expose a friendly by-example syntax. We use these to obtain positive examples by searching for sentences that are syntactically similar to user input examples. We apply this technique to relations from TACRED and DocRED and show that the resulting models are competitive with models trained on manually annotated data and on data obtained from distant supervision. The models also outperform models trained using NLG data augmentation techniques. Extending the search-based approach with the NLG method further improves the results.

An established method for Word Sense Induction (WSI) uses a language model to predict probable substitutes for target words, and induces senses by clustering these resulting substitute vectors. We replace the ngram-based language model (LM) with a recurrent one. Beyond being more accurate, the use of the recurrent LM allows us to effectively query it in a creative way, using what we call dynamic symmetric patterns. The combination of the RNN-LM and the dynamic symmetric patterns results in strong substitute vectors for WSI, allowing to surpass the current state-of-the-art on the SemEval 2013 WSI shared task by a large margin.