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Improving Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction through BERT-based Label & Instance Embeddings

1 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.01156archive 2025-07-28

Despina Christou, Grigorios Tsoumakas

Distantly-supervised relation extraction (RE) is an effective method to scale RE to large corpora but suffers from noisy labels. Existing approaches try to alleviate noise through multi-instance learning and by providing additional information, but manage to recognize mainly the top frequent relations, neglecting those in the long-tail. We propose REDSandT (Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Transformers), a novel distantly-supervised transformer-based RE method, that manages to capture a wider set of relations through highly informative instance and label embeddings for RE, by exploiting BERT's pre-trained model, and the relationship between labels and entities, respectively. We guide REDSandT to focus solely on relational tokens by fine-tuning BERT on a structured input, including the sub-tree connecting an entity pair and the entities' types. Using the extracted informative vectors, we shape label embeddings, which we also use as attention mechanism over instances to further reduce noise. Finally, we represent sentences by concatenating relation and instance embeddings. Experiments in the NYT-10 dataset show that REDSandT captures a broader set of relations with higher confidence, achieving state-of-the-art AUC (0.424).

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Tasks

Relation ExtractionRelationship Extraction (Distant Supervised)

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Relationship Extraction (Distant Supervised) New York Times Corpus REDSandT AUC 0.424 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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