Document-level relation extraction with Entity-Selection Attention

Abstract

Document-level relation extraction is a complex natural language processing task that predicts relations of entity pairs by capturing the critical semantic features on entity pairs from the document. However, current methods usually consider that the entity pairs contain the vast majority of information which can represent relational facts, and thus focus on modeling the entity pair, ignoring features on whole document and sentences. In the document-level relation extraction, the distance between entity pairs is relatively long. Judging the relation between entities usually requires reading many sentences or the whole document. Therefore, sentences and documents are particularly crucial for document-level relation extraction. In order to make full use of the multi-level information of sentences and documents, this paper proposes a document-level relation extraction framework with two advantages. First, we use the encoder to obtain the semantic features about the document and use the inter-sentence attention based on entity pairs to dynamically capture the features of multiple vital sentences. Second, we design a document gating that combines sentence-level features with document-level features to predict relations. Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset have well-validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.