Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction

Huiwei Zhou, Yibin Xu, Weihong Yao, Zhe Liu, Chengkun Lang, Haibin Jiang


Abstract
Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) is particularly challenging due to complex semantic interactions among multiple entities in a document. Among exiting approaches, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) is one of the most effective approaches for document-level RE. However, traditional GCN simply takes word nodes and adjacency matrix to represent graphs, which is difficult to establish direct connections between distant entity pairs. In this paper, we propose Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks (GCGCN), a novel model which is composed of entities as nodes and context of entity pairs as edges between nodes to capture rich global context information of entities in a document. Two hierarchical blocks, Context-aware Attention Guided Graph Convolution (CAGGC) for partially connected graphs and Multi-head Attention Guided Graph Convolution (MAGGC) for fully connected graphs, could take progressively more global context into account. Meantime, we leverage a large-scale distantly supervised dataset to pre-train a GCGCN model with curriculum learning, which is then fine-tuned on the human-annotated dataset for further improving document-level RE performance. The experimental results on DocRED show that our model could effectively capture rich global context information in the document, leading to a state-of-the-art result. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huiweizhou/GCGCN.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.461
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5259–5270
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.461
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.461
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huiwei Zhou, Yibin Xu, Weihong Yao, Zhe Liu, Chengkun Lang, and Haibin Jiang. 2020. Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5259–5270, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction (Zhou et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.coling-main.461.pdf
Code
 huiweizhou/gcgcn
Data
DocRED