M-BRe: Discovering Training Samples for Relation Extraction from Unlabeled Texts with Large Language Models

Zexuan Li, Hongliang Dai, Piji Li


Abstract
For Relation Extraction (RE), the manual annotation of training data may be prohibitively expensive, since the sentences that contain the target relations in texts can be very scarce and difficult to find. It is therefore beneficial to develop an efficient method that can automatically extract training instances from unlabeled texts for training RE models. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been adopted in various natural language processing tasks, with RE also benefiting from their advances. However, when leveraging LLMs for RE with predefined relation categories, two key challenges arise. First, in a multi-class classification setting, LLMs often struggle to comprehensively capture the semantics of every relation, leading to suboptimal results. Second, although employing binary classification for each relation individually can mitigate this issue, it introduces significant computational overhead, resulting in impractical time complexity for real-world applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework called M-BRe to extract training instances from unlabeled texts for RE. It utilizes three modules to combine the advantages of both of the above classification approaches: Relation Grouping, Relation Extraction, and Label Decision. Extensive experiments confirm its superior capability in discovering high-quality training samples from unlabeled texts for RE.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.264
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
5220–5238
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.264/
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Cite (ACL):
Zexuan Li, Hongliang Dai, and Piji Li. 2025. M-BRe: Discovering Training Samples for Relation Extraction from Unlabeled Texts with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5220–5238, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
M-BRe: Discovering Training Samples for Relation Extraction from Unlabeled Texts with Large Language Models (Li et al., EMNLP 2025)
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