Jointprop: Joint Semi-supervised Learning for Entity and Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation

Yandan Zheng, Anran Hao, Anh Tuan Luu


Abstract
Semi-supervised learning has been an important approach to address challenges in extracting entities and relations from limited data. However, current semi-supervised works handle the two tasks (i.e., Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction) separately and ignore the cross-correlation of entity and relation instances as well as the existence of similar instances across unlabeled data. To alleviate the issues, we propose Jointprop, a Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation framework for joint semi-supervised entity and relation extraction, which captures the global structure information between individual tasks and exploits interactions within unlabeled data. Specifically, we construct a unified span-based heterogeneous graph from entity and relation candidates and propagate class labels based on confidence scores. We then employ a propagation learning scheme to leverage the affinities between labelled and unlabeled samples. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches on NER and RE tasks. We show that the joint semi-supervised learning of the two tasks benefits from their codependency and validates the importance of utilizing the shared information between unlabeled data.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.813
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14541–14555
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.813
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.813
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yandan Zheng, Anran Hao, and Anh Tuan Luu. 2023. Jointprop: Joint Semi-supervised Learning for Entity and Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14541–14555, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Jointprop: Joint Semi-supervised Learning for Entity and Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation (Zheng et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.813.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.813.mp4