Papers › Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

19 Jun 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1906.08646archive 2025-07-28

Christoph Alt, Marc Hübner, Leonhard Hennig

Distantly supervised relation extraction is widely used to extract relational facts from text, but suffers from noisy labels. Current relation extraction methods try to alleviate the noise by multi-instance learning and by providing supporting linguistic and contextual information to more efficiently guide the relation classification. While achieving state-of-the-art results, we observed these models to be biased towards recognizing a limited set of relations with high precision, while ignoring those in the long tail. To address this gap, we utilize a pre-trained language model, the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) [Radford et al., 2018]. The GPT and similar models have been shown to capture semantic and syntactic features, and also a notable amount of "common-sense" knowledge, which we hypothesize are important features for recognizing a more diverse set of relations. By extending the GPT to the distantly supervised setting, and fine-tuning it on the NYT10 dataset, we show that it predicts a larger set of distinct relation types with high confidence. Manual and automated evaluation of our model shows that it achieves a state-of-the-art AUC score of 0.422 on the NYT10 dataset, and performs especially well at higher recall levels.

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Common Sense ReasoningLanguage ModellingRelation ClassificationRelation Extraction

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight Decay

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