Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs

Nanyun Peng, Hoifung Poon, Chris Quirk, Kristina Toutanova, Wen-tau Yih


Abstract
Past work in relation extraction has focused on binary relations in single sentences. Recent NLP inroads in high-value domains have sparked interest in the more general setting of extracting n-ary relations that span multiple sentences. In this paper, we explore a general relation extraction framework based on graph long short-term memory networks (graph LSTMs) that can be easily extended to cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction. The graph formulation provides a unified way of exploring different LSTM approaches and incorporating various intra-sentential and inter-sentential dependencies, such as sequential, syntactic, and discourse relations. A robust contextual representation is learned for the entities, which serves as input to the relation classifier. This simplifies handling of relations with arbitrary arity, and enables multi-task learning with related relations. We evaluate this framework in two important precision medicine settings, demonstrating its effectiveness with both conventional supervised learning and distant supervision. Cross-sentence extraction produced larger knowledge bases. and multi-task learning significantly improved extraction accuracy. A thorough analysis of various LSTM approaches yielded useful insight the impact of linguistic analysis on extraction accuracy.
Anthology ID:
Q17-1008
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 5
Month:
Year:
2017
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
101–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q17-1008
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00049
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nanyun Peng, Hoifung Poon, Chris Quirk, Kristina Toutanova, and Wen-tau Yih. 2017. Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5:101–115.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs (Peng et al., TACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q17-1008.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/Q17-1008.mp4