Papers › Towards Realistic Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Towards Realistic Few-Shot Relation Extraction

1 Nov 2021EMNLP 2021 11archive 2025-07-28

Sam Brody, Sichao Wu, Adrian Benton

In recent years, few-shot models have been applied successfully to a variety of NLP tasks. Han et al. (2018) introduced a few-shot learning framework for relation classification, and since then, several models have surpassed human performance on this task, leading to the impression that few-shot relation classification is solved. In this paper we take a deeper look at the efficacy of strong few-shot classification models in the more common relation extraction setting, and show that typical few-shot evaluation metrics obscure a wide variability in performance across relations. In particular, we find that state of the art few-shot relation classification models overly rely on entity type information, and propose modifications to the training routine to encourage models to better discriminate between relations involving similar entity types.

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ClassificationFew-Shot LearningFew-Shot Relation ClassificationRelation ClassificationRelation Extraction

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