Single-Stage Entity–Relation Joint Extraction of Pesticide Registration Information Based on HT-BES Multi-Dimensional Labeling Strategy

Abstract

Pesticide registration information is an essential part of the pesticide knowledge base. However, the large amount of unstructured text data that it contains pose significant challenges for knowledge storage, retrieval, and utilization. To address the characteristics of pesticide registration text such as high information density, complex logical structures, large spans between entities, and heterogeneous entity lengths, as well as to overcome the challenges faced when using traditional joint extraction methods, including triplet overlap, exposure bias, and redundant computation, we propose a single-stage entity–relation joint extraction model based on HT-BES multi-dimensional labeling (MD-SERel). First, in the encoding layer, to address the complex structural characteristics of pesticide registration texts, we employ RoBERTa combined with a multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture the deep semantic features of the text. Simultaneously, syntactic features are extracted using a syntactic dependency tree and graph neural networks to enhance the model’s understanding of text structure. Subsequently, we integrate semantic and syntactic features, enriching the character vector representations and thus improving the model’s ability to represent complex textual data. Secondly, in the multi-dimensional labeling framework layer, we use HT-BES multi-dimensional labeling, where the model assigns multiple labels to each character. These labels include entity boundaries, positions, and head–tail entity association information, which naturally resolves overlapping triplets. Through utilizing a parallel scoring function and fine-grained classification components, the joint extraction of entities and relations is transformed into a multi-label sequence labeling task based on relation dimensions. This process does not involve interdependent steps, thus enabling single-stage parallel labeling, preventing exposure bias and reducing computational redundancy. Finally, in the decoding layer, entity–relation triplets are decoded based on the predicted labels from the fine-grained classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the MD-SERel model performs well on both the Pesticide Registration Dataset (PRD) and the general DuIE dataset. On the PRD, compared to the optimal baseline model, the training time is 1.2 times faster, the inference time is 1.2 times faster, and the F1 score is improved by 1.5%, demonstrating its knowledge extraction capabilities in pesticide registration documents. On the DuIE dataset, the MD-SERel model also achieved better results compared to the baseline, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. These findings will provide technical support for the construction of pesticide knowledge bases.