Entity Pair-guided Relation Summarization and Retrieval in LLMs for Document-level Relation Extraction

Fu Zhang, Hongsen Yu, Jingwei Cheng, Huangming Xu


Abstract
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entities in a document. While previous research has primarily focused on traditional small models, recent studies have extended the scope to large language models (LLMs). Current LLM-based methods typically focus on filtering all potential relations (candidate relations) within a document at one time and then performing triplet fact extraction. However, most approaches for candidate relation filtering are based on the document level, which results in insufficient correlation between candidate relations and entity pairs. In addition, the data imbalance problem caused by a large amount of no-relation data (NA problem) is another important reason for the suboptimal performance of LLM-based methods. To address these issues, we propose an entity pair-guided relation summarization and retrieval model (EP-RSR) for DocRE, which introduces an innovative LLM-based document-level relation extraction paradigm, EPRF (Entity Pair-Relation-Fact), along with an entity pair-level candidate relation filtering method. Our approach first selects entity pairs that potentially contain relations and uses them to guide relation summarization and retrieval for extracting relation facts. This enhances the relevance between candidate relations and entity pairs while alleviating the issue of imbalanced NA data. Benchmark testing on three datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for LLM-based models. Our code is available at https://github.com/LookingYu/EP-RSR.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.224
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
4022–4037
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.224/
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Cite (ACL):
Fu Zhang, Hongsen Yu, Jingwei Cheng, and Huangming Xu. 2025. Entity Pair-guided Relation Summarization and Retrieval in LLMs for Document-level Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 4022–4037, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity Pair-guided Relation Summarization and Retrieval in LLMs for Document-level Relation Extraction (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.224.pdf