ET-MIER: Entity Type-guided Key Mention Identification and Evidence Retrieval for Document-level Relation Extraction

Xin Li, Huangming Xu, Fu Zhang, Jingwei Cheng


Abstract
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) task aims to identify relations between entities in a document. In DocRE, an entity may appear in multiple sentences of a document in the form of mentions. In addition, relation inference requires the use of evidence sentences that can provide key clues to entity pairs. These make DocRE more challenging than sentencelevel relation extraction. Existing work does not fully distinguish the contribution of different mentions to entity representation and the importance of mentions in evidence sentences. To address these issues, we observe that entity types can provide consistent semantic constraints for entities of the same type and implicitly preclude impossible relations between entities, which may help the model better understand both intra- and inter-entity mentions. Therefore, we propose a novel model ET-MIER, which for the first time leverages **E**ntity **T**ypes to guide key **M**ention **I**dentification and **E**vidence **R**etrieval. In this way, entity types not only help learn better entity representation but also enhance evidence retrieval, both of which are crucial for DocRE. We conduct experiments on widely-adopted datasets and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NEU-IDKE/ET-MIER
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.961
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17701–17714
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.961/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.961
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xin Li, Huangming Xu, Fu Zhang, and Jingwei Cheng. 2025. ET-MIER: Entity Type-guided Key Mention Identification and Evidence Retrieval for Document-level Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 17701–17714, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ET-MIER: Entity Type-guided Key Mention Identification and Evidence Retrieval for Document-level Relation Extraction (Li et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.961.pdf
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