Extraction of Joint Entity and Relationships with Soft Pruning and GlobalPointer

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the joint entity and relation extraction. However, the most difficult aspect of joint extraction is extracting overlapping triples. To address this problem, we propose a joint extraction model based on Soft Pruning and GlobalPointer, short for SGNet. In the first place, the BERT pretraining model is used to obtain the text word vector representation with contextual information, and then the local and non-local information of the word vector is obtained through graph operations. Specifically, to address the lack of information caused by the rule-based pruning strategies, we utilize the Gaussian Graph Generator and the attention-guiding layer to construct a fully connected graph. This process is called soft pruning for short. Then, to achieve node message passing and information integration, we employ GCNs and a thick connection layer. Next, we use the GlobalPointer decoder to convert triple extraction into quintuple extraction to tackle the problem of problematic overlapping triples extraction. The GlobalPointer decoder, unlike the typical feedforward neural network (FNN), can perform joint decoding. In the end, to evaluate the model performance, the experiment was carried out on two public datasets: the NYT and WebNLG. The experiments show that SGNet performs substantially better on overlapping extraction and achieves good results on two publicly available datasets.