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Joint extraction of entities and relations using multi-label tagging and relational alignment

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Abstract

Relation extraction aims to identify semantic relations between entities in text. In recent years, this task has been extended to the joint extraction of entities and relations, which requires the simultaneous identification of entities and their relations from sentences. However, existing methods, limited by the existing tagging scheme, fail to identify more complex entities, which in turn limits the performance of the joint extraction task. This article presents a joint extraction model for entities and relations called MLRA-LSTM-CRF that uses multi-label tagging and relational alignment to transform this task into a multi-label tag recognition problem. The proposed model first tags the entities and their relations according to the multi-label tagging scheme and then uses a joint entity and relation extraction module with a multi-layer attention mechanism to extract the triplets in the sentence. Finally, the relational alignment module is used to align the predicted relation classification results. Experimental results on the New York Times and Wiki-KBP datasets indicate that MLRA-LSTM-CRF is significantly better than that of several state-of-the-art models and baseline.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/shanzhenren/CoType.

  2. https://github.com/LiyuanLucasLiu/ReHession.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2021YFB3900601, the Graduate Research and Innovation Projects of Jiangsu Province under Grant KYCX19\_0507, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2019B64214, and the University Natural Science Research Projects of Anhui Province under Grant KJ2019A1277.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Water Big Data Technology of Ministry of Water Resources, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Tingting Hang, Jun Feng, Le Yan, Yunfeng Wang & Jiamin Lu

  2. School of Computer and Information, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Tingting Hang, Jun Feng, Le Yan, Yunfeng Wang & Jiamin Lu

  3. College of Electricity and Information, Wanjiang University of Technology, Maanshan, China

    Tingting Hang

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Hang, T., Feng, J., Yan, L. et al. Joint extraction of entities and relations using multi-label tagging and relational alignment. Neural Comput & Applic 34, 6397–6412 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-06685-1

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