Few-Shot Relation Extraction on Ancient Chinese Documents

Traditional humanity scholars’ inefficient method of utilizing numerous unstructured data has hampered studies on ancient Chinese writings for several years. In this work, we aim to develop a relation extractor for ancient Chinese documents to automatically extract the relations by using unstructured data. To achieve this goal, we proposed a tiny ancient Chinese document relation classification (TinyACD-RC) dataset annotated by historians and contains 32 types of general relations in ShihChi (a famous Chinese history book). We also explored several methods and proposed a novel model that works well on sufficient and insufficient data scenarios, the proposed sentence encoder can simultaneously capture local and global features for a certain period. The paired attention network enhances and extracts relations between support and query instances. Experimental results show that our model achieved promising performance with scarce corpus. We also examined our model on the FewRel dataset and found that outperformed the state-of-the-art no pretraining-based models by 2.27%.

Relation classification via BERT with piecewise convolution and focal loss

Recent relation extraction models’ architecture are evolved from the shallow neural networks to natural language model, such as convolutional neural networks or recurrent neural networks to Bert. However, these methods did not consider the semantic information in the sequence or the distance dependence problem, the internal semantic information may contain the useful knowledge which can help relation classification. Focus on these problems, this paper proposed a BERT-based relation classification method. Compare with the existing Bert-based architecture, the proposed model can obtain the internal semantic information between entity pair and solve the distance semantic dependence better. The pre-trained BERT model after fine tuning is used in this paper to abstract the semantic representation of sequence, then adopt the piecewise convolution to obtain semantic information which influence the extraction results. Compare with the existing methods, the proposed method can achieve a better accuracy on relational extraction task because of the internal semantic information extracted in the sequence. While, the generalization ability is still a problem that cannot be ignored, and the numbers of the relationships are difference between different categories. In this paper, the focal loss function is adopted to solve this problem by assigning a heavy weight to less number or hard classify categories. Finally, comparing with the existing methods, the F1 metric of the proposed method can reach a superior result 89.95% on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 dataset.