@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-debar,
    title = "{DEBAR}: Mitigating Contextual Bias in Cross-Document Relation Extraction via Dual-Stream Decoupling",
    author = "Yang, Zhixuan  and
      Zhang, Fu  and
      Xu, Huangming  and
      Cheng, Jingwei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1091/",
    pages = "23804--23815",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Cross-document Relation Extraction (CodRE) requires reasoning over scattered evidence to identify relations between target entities across multiple documents. Existing methods indiscriminately fuse target entities and the intermediate bridge entities that link them into a unified representation. This leads to intermediate evidence that often aligns with only one side of the entity pair, resulting in one-sided relation transfer contextual bias and incomplete reasoning chains. Moreover, these methods typically employ a global threshold to determine relation existence for all entity pairs, limiting the model{'}s reasoning performance.To address these issues, we propose **DEBAR** (Dual-stream Entity Bias Reduction), a framework designed to explicitly decouple and preserve bidirectional bridge evidence, combined with a novel dynamic loss optimization objective. Specifically, DEBAR employs a **bridge-aware input construction** strategy and a **dual-stream graph reasoning network** to separately encode head and tail contexts, preventing semantic interference while capturing global dependencies through iterative message passing. Furthermore, we introduce a **curriculum-aware ranking optimization objective** that progressively tightens classification constraints to stabilize training and enforce discriminative decision boundaries. Experiments on the CodRE benchmarks show that DEBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance while effectively mitigating cross-document contextual bias. Moreover, extensive experiments on our proposed loss across backbones confirm its generalization, suggesting it as a reliable replacement for existing CodRE losses. Code is available at https://github.com/newyuyou/DEBAR."
}