Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction

Guoshun Nan, Zhijiang Guo, Ivan Sekulic, Wei Lu


Abstract
Document-level relation extraction requires integrating information within and across multiple sentences of a document and capturing complex interactions between inter-sentence entities. However, effective aggregation of relevant information in the document remains a challenging research question. Existing approaches construct static document-level graphs based on syntactic trees, co-references or heuristics from the unstructured text to model the dependencies. Unlike previous methods that may not be able to capture rich non-local interactions for inference, we propose a novel model that empowers the relational reasoning across sentences by automatically inducing the latent document-level graph. We further develop a refinement strategy, which enables the model to incrementally aggregate relevant information for multi-hop reasoning. Specifically, our model achieves an F1 score of 59.05 on a large-scale document-level dataset (DocRED), significantly improving over the previous results, and also yields new state-of-the-art results on the CDR and GDA dataset. Furthermore, extensive analyses show that the model is able to discover more accurate inter-sentence relations.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1546–1557
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.141
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.141
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guoshun Nan, Zhijiang Guo, Ivan Sekulic, and Wei Lu. 2020. Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1546–1557, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction (Nan et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.141.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929374
Code
 nanguoshun/LSR +  additional community code
Data
CDRDocREDGDA