Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction via Recursive Hierarchy-Interactive Attention and Entity-Order Perception

Abstract

Wrong-labeling problem and long-tail relations severely affect the performance of distantly supervised relation extraction task. Many studies mitigate the effect of wrong-labeling through selective attention mechanism and handle long-tail relations by introducing relation hierarchies to share knowledge. However, almost all existing studies ignore the fact that, in a sentence, the appearance order of two entities contributes to the understanding of its semantics. Furthermore, they only utilize each relation level of relation hierarchies separately, but do not exploit the heuristic effect between relation levels, i.e., higher-level relations can give useful information to the lower ones. Based on the above, in this paper, we design a novel Recursive Hierarchy-Interactive Attention network (RHIA) to further handle long-tail relations, which models the heuristic effect between relation levels. From the top down, it passes relation-related information layer by layer, which is the most significant difference from existing models, and generates relation-augmented sentence representations for each relation level in a recursive structure. Besides, we introduce a newfangled training objective, called Entity-Order Perception (EOP), to make the sentence encoder retain more entity appearance information. Substantial experiments on the popular New York Times (NYT) dataset are conducted. Compared to prior baselines, our RHIA-EOP achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of precision–recall (P–R) curves, AUC, Top-N precision and other evaluation metrics. Insightful analysis also demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of each component of RHIA-EOP.