Enhancing Discriminative Representation in Similar Relation Clusters for Few-Shot Continual Relation Extraction

Anh Duc Le, Nam Le Hai, Thanh Xuan Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep, Sang Dinh, Thien Huu Nguyen


Abstract
Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction (FCRE) has emerged as a significant challenge in information extraction, necessitating that relation extraction (RE) systems can sequentially identify new relations with limited labeled samples. While existing studies have demonstrated promising results in FCRE, they often overlook the issue of similar relations, which is a critical factor contributing to catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose Sirus–a novel method that utilizes relation descriptions and dynamic clustering on these descriptions to identify similar relations. Leveraging this information, we introduce innovative loss functions specifically designed to enhance the distinction between relations, with a focus on learning to differentiate similar ones. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively mitigate the problem of catastrophic forgetting and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Additionally, we explore the potential of Large Language Model Embeddings (LLMEs) with representation learning and embedding capabilities, demonstrating their promise for advancing FCRE systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.123
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2450–2467
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.123/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anh Duc Le, Nam Le Hai, Thanh Xuan Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep, Sang Dinh, and Thien Huu Nguyen. 2025. Enhancing Discriminative Representation in Similar Relation Clusters for Few-Shot Continual Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2450–2467, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Discriminative Representation in Similar Relation Clusters for Few-Shot Continual Relation Extraction (Le et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.123.pdf