Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering

Xiaoya Li, Fan Yin, Zijun Sun, Xiayu Li, Arianna Yuan, Duo Chai, Mingxin Zhou, Jiwei Li

Abstract
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the task of entity-relation extraction. We cast the task as a multi-turn question answering problem, i.e., the extraction of entities and elations is transformed to the task of identifying answer spans from the context. This multi-turn QA formalization comes with several key advantages: firstly, the question query encodes important information for the entity/relation class we want to identify; secondly, QA provides a natural way of jointly modeling entity and relation; and thirdly, it allows us to exploit the well developed machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. Experiments on the ACE and the CoNLL04 corpora demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms previous best models. We are able to obtain the state-of-the-art results on all of the ACE04, ACE05 and CoNLL04 datasets, increasing the SOTA results on the three datasets to 49.6 (+1.2), 60.3 (+0.7) and 69.2 (+1.4), respectively. Additionally, we construct and will release a newly developed dataset RESUME, which requires multi-step reasoning to construct entity dependencies, as opposed to the single-step dependency extraction in the triplet exaction in previous datasets. The proposed multi-turn QA model also achieves the best performance on the RESUME dataset.
Anthology ID:
P19-1129
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1340–1350
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1129
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1129
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoya Li, Fan Yin, Zijun Sun, Xiayu Li, Arianna Yuan, Duo Chai, Mingxin Zhou, and Jiwei Li. 2019. Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1340–1350, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering (Li et al., ACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P19-1129.pdf
Data
ACE 2004, ACE 2005
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