Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Christoph Alt, Marc Hübner, Leonhard Hennig


Abstract
Distantly supervised relation extraction is widely used to extract relational facts from text, but suffers from noisy labels. Current relation extraction methods try to alleviate the noise by multi-instance learning and by providing supporting linguistic and contextual information to more efficiently guide the relation classification. While achieving state-of-the-art results, we observed these models to be biased towards recognizing a limited set of relations with high precision, while ignoring those in the long tail. To address this gap, we utilize a pre-trained language model, the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) (Radford et al., 2018). The GPT and similar models have been shown to capture semantic and syntactic features, and also a notable amount of “common-sense” knowledge, which we hypothesize are important features for recognizing a more diverse set of relations. By extending the GPT to the distantly supervised setting, and fine-tuning it on the NYT10 dataset, we show that it predicts a larger set of distinct relation types with high confidence. Manual and automated evaluation of our model shows that it achieves a state-of-the-art AUC score of 0.422 on the NYT10 dataset, and performs especially well at higher recall levels.
Anthology ID:
P19-1134
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1388–1398
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1134
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1134
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christoph Alt, Marc Hübner, and Leonhard Hennig. 2019. Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1388–1398, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (Alt et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1134.pdf
Code
 DFKI-NLP/DISTRE