SegDRE: A Salient Entity Guided Approach to Document-Level Relation Extraction

Xing Yang, Chengxiang Tan


Abstract
In Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE), relational facts are typically organized around a few salient entities. Explicitly capturing this topological structure is pivotal to addressing the two critical bottlenecks of the task: the extreme class imbalance and the complexity of multi-hop reasoning. Based on this insight, we first introduce the concept of the salient entity and propose a novel approach that decouples the extraction space into dense and sparse scenarios. Specifically, our approach restricts the search space for dense pairs to mitigate the dominance of the negative samples, and innovatively injects the rich semantic knowledge of salient entities to explicitly reconstruct the document for bridging disjoint evidence in multi-hop reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach yields consistent improvements over various backbone models and achieves advanced performance compared to existing enhancement methods.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1192
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
23800–23812
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1192/
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Cite (ACL):
Xing Yang and Chengxiang Tan. 2026. SegDRE: A Salient Entity Guided Approach to Document-Level Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 23800–23812, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SegDRE: A Salient Entity Guided Approach to Document-Level Relation Extraction (Yang & Tan, Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1192.pdf
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