Relation Extraction Exploiting Full Dependency Forests

2020-06-02

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34

Volume

Vol. 34 No. 05: AAAI-20 Technical Tracks 5

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing

Dependency syntax has long been recognized as a crucial source of features for relation extraction. Previous work considers 1-best trees produced by a parser during preprocessing. However, error propagation from the out-of-domain parser may impact the relation extraction performance. We propose to leverage full dependency forests for this task, where a full dependency forest encodes all possible trees. Such representations of full dependency forests provide a differentiable connection between a parser and a relation extraction model, and thus we are also able to study adjusting the parser parameters based on end-task loss. Experiments on three datasets show that full dependency forests and parser adjustment give significant improvements over carefully designed baselines, showing state-of-the-art or competitive performances on biomedical or newswire benchmarks.

10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6313