Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) represents a crucial NLP task aimed at deriving structured information from unstructured text, unrestricted by relation type or domain. This survey paper provides an overview of OpenIE technologies spanning from 2007 to 2024, emphasizing a chronological perspective absent in prior surveys. It examines the evolution of task settings in OpenIE to align with the advances in recent technologies. The paper categorizes OpenIE approaches into rule-based, neural, and pre-trained large language models, discussing each within a chronological framework. Additionally, it highlights prevalent datasets and evaluation metrics currently in use. Building on this extensive review, this paper systematically reviews the evolution of task settings, data, evaluation metrics, and methodologies in the era of large language models, highlighting their mutual influence, comparing their capabilities, and examining their implications for open challenges and future research directions.

The ability of common sense validation and explanation is very important for most models. Most obviously, this will directly affect the rationality of the generated model output. The large amount and diversity of common sense poses great challenges to this task. In addition, many common sense expressions are obscure, thus we need to understand the meaning contained in the vocabulary in order to judge correctly, which further increases the model’s requirements for the accuracy of word representation. The current neural network models are often data-driven, while the annotated data is often limited and requires a lot of manual labeling. In such case, we proposed transfer learning to handle this challenge. From our experiments, we can draw the following three main conclusions: a) Neural language model fully qualified for commonsense validation and explanation. We attribute this to the powerful word and sentence representation capabilities of language models. b) The inconsistency of task of pre-training and fine-tuning will badly hurt the performance. c) A larger amount of corpus and more parameters will enhance the common sense of the model. At the same time, the content of the corpus is equally important.