Looking Beyond Label Noise: Shifted Label Distribution Matters in Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

In recent years there is a surge of interest in applying distant supervision (DS) to automatically generate training data for relation extraction (RE). In this paper, we study the problem what limits the performance of DS-trained neural models, conduct thorough analyses, and identify a factor that can influence the performance greatly, shifted label distribution. Specifically, we found this problem commonly exists in real-world DS datasets, and without special handing, typical DS-RE models cannot automatically adapt to this shift, thus achieving deteriorated performance. To further validate our intuition, we develop a simple yet effective adaptation method for DS-trained models, bias adjustment, which updates models learned over the source domain (i.e., DS training set) with a label distribution estimated on the target domain (i.e., test set). Experiments demonstrate that bias adjustment achieves consistent performance gains on DS-trained models, especially on neural models, with an up to 23% relative F1 improvement, which verifies our assumptions. Our code and data can be found at \url{https://github.com/INK-USC/shifted-label-distribution}.Comment: 13 pages: 10 pages paper, 3 pages appendix. Appears at EMNLP 201

Cross-relation Cross-bag Attention for Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction

Distant supervision leverages knowledge bases to automatically label instances, thus allowing us to train relation extractor without human annotations. However, the generated training data typically contain massive noise, and may result in poor performances with the vanilla supervised learning. In this paper, we propose to conduct multi-instance learning with a novel Cross-relation Cross-bag Selective Attention (C$^2$SA), which leads to noise-robust training for distant supervised relation extractor. Specifically, we employ the sentence-level selective attention to reduce the effect of noisy or mismatched sentences, while the correlation among relations were captured to improve the quality of attention weights. Moreover, instead of treating all entity-pairs equally, we try to pay more attention to entity-pairs with a higher quality. Similarly, we adopt the selective attention mechanism to achieve this goal. Experiments with two types of relation extractor demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art, while further ablation studies verify our intuitions and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed two techniques.Comment: AAAI 201

RESIDE: Improving Distantly-Supervised Neural Relation Extraction using Side Information

Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction (RE) methods train an extractor by automatically aligning relation instances in a Knowledge Base (KB) with unstructured text. In addition to relation instances, KBs often contain other relevant side information, such as aliases of relations (e.g., founded and co-founded are aliases for the relation founderOfCompany). RE models usually ignore such readily available side information. In this paper, we propose RESIDE, a distantly-supervised neural relation extraction method which utilizes additional side information from KBs for improved relation extraction. It uses entity type and relation alias information for imposing soft constraints while predicting relations. RESIDE employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode syntactic information from text and improves performance even when limited side information is available. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate RESIDE's effectiveness. We have made RESIDE's source code available to encourage reproducible research.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, EMNLP 201