Entity Relative Position Representation based Multi-head Selection for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

Tianyang Zhao, Zhao Yan, Yunbo Cao, Zhoujun Li


Abstract
Joint entity and relation extraction has received increasing interests recently, due to the capability of utilizing the interactions between both steps. Among existing studies, the Multi-Head Selection (MHS) framework is efficient in extracting entities and relations simultaneously. However, the method is weak for its limited performance. In this paper, we propose several effective insights to address this problem. First, we propose an entity-specific Relative Position Representation (eRPR) to allow the model to fully leverage the distance information between entities and context tokens. Second, we introduce an auxiliary Global Relation Classification (GRC) to enhance the learning of local contextual features. Moreover, we improve the semantic representation by adopting a pre-trained language model BERT as the feature encoder. Finally, these new keypoints are closely integrated with the multi-head selection framework and optimized jointly. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach overwhelmingly outperforms previous works in terms of all evaluation metrics, achieving significant improvements for relation F1 by +2.40% on CoNLL04 and +1.90% on ACE05, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2020.ccl-1.89
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2020
Address:
Haikou, China
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
962–973
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.ccl-1.89
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianyang Zhao, Zhao Yan, Yunbo Cao, and Zhoujun Li. 2020. Entity Relative Position Representation based Multi-head Selection for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 962–973, Haikou, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Entity Relative Position Representation based Multi-head Selection for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (Zhao et al., CCL 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.ccl-1.89.pdf