A Hierarchical Framework for Relation Extraction with Reinforcement Learning

Most existing methods determine relation types only after all the entities have been recognized, thus the interaction between relation types and entity mentions is not fully modeled. This paper presents a novel paradigm to deal with relation extraction by regarding the related entities as the arguments of a relation. We apply a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework in this paradigm to enhance the interaction between entity mentions and relation types. The whole extraction process is decomposed into a hierarchy of two-level RL policies for relation detection and entity extraction respectively, so that it is more feasible and natural to deal with overlapping relations. Our model was evaluated on public datasets collected via distant supervision, and results show that it gains better performance than existing methods and is more powerful for extracting overlapping relations.Comment: To appear in AAAI 1

Improving Information Extraction by Acquiring External Evidence with Reinforcement Learning

Most successful information extraction systems operate with access to a large collection of documents. In this work, we explore the task of acquiring and incorporating external evidence to improve extraction accuracy in domains where the amount of training data is scarce. This process entails issuing search queries, extraction from new sources and reconciliation of extracted values, which are repeated until sufficient evidence is collected. We approach the problem using a reinforcement learning framework where our model learns to select optimal actions based on contextual information. We employ a deep Q-network, trained to optimize a reward function that reflects extraction accuracy while penalizing extra effort. Our experiments on two databases -- of shooting incidents, and food adulteration cases -- demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms traditional extractors and a competitive meta-classifier baseline.Comment: Appearing in EMNLP 2016 (12 pages incl. supplementary material