Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction beyond the Sentence Boundary

Chris Quirk, Hoifung Poon


Abstract
The growing demand for structured knowledge has led to great interest in relation extraction, especially in cases with limited supervision. However, existing distance supervision approaches only extract relations expressed in single sentences. In general, cross-sentence relation extraction is under-explored, even in the supervised-learning setting. In this paper, we propose the first approach for applying distant supervision to cross-sentence relation extraction. At the core of our approach is a graph representation that can incorporate both standard dependencies and discourse relations, thus providing a unifying way to model relations within and across sentences. We extract features from multiple paths in this graph, increasing accuracy and robustness when confronted with linguistic variation and analysis error. Experiments on an important extraction task for precision medicine show that our approach can learn an accurate cross-sentence extractor, using only a small existing knowledge base and unlabeled text from biomedical research articles. Compared to the existing distant supervision paradigm, our approach extracted twice as many relations at similar precision, thus demonstrating the prevalence of cross-sentence relations and the promise of our approach.
Anthology ID:
E17-1110
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1171–1182
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1110
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chris Quirk and Hoifung Poon. 2017. Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction beyond the Sentence Boundary. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 1171–1182, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction beyond the Sentence Boundary (Quirk & Poon, EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1110.pdf