Over 50 million scholarly articles have been published: they constitute a unique repository of knowledge. In particular, one may infer from them relations between scientific concepts, such as synonyms and hyponyms. Artificial neural networks have been recently explored for relation extraction. In this work, we continue this line of work and present a system based on a convolutional neural network to extract relations. Our model ranked first in the SemEval-2017 task 10 (ScienceIE) for relation extraction in scientific articles (subtask C).
Relation extraction can be seen as a process comprising two steps that can be done jointly @cite_2 or separately: first, entities of interest need to be identified, then the relation among each possible set of entities has to be determined. In this work, we concentrate on the second step (often referred to as relation extraction or classification) and on binary relations, i.e. relations between two entities. Extracted relations can be used for a variety of tasks such as question-answering systems @cite_5 , ontology extension @cite_27 , and clinical trials @cite_4 .
@cite_5 @cite_27 @cite_4 @cite_2
2167435923 1908162016 190884861 2134033474
Extracting biomedical entities and their relations from text has important applications on biomedical research. Previous work primarily utilized feature-based pipeline models to process this task. Many efforts need to be made on feature engineering when feature-based models are employed. Moreover, pipeline models may suffer error propagation and are not able to utilize the interactions between subtasks. Therefore, we propose a neural joint model to extract biomedical entities as well as their relations simultaneously, and it can alleviate the problems above. Our model was evaluated on two tasks, i.e., the task of extracting adverse drug events between drug and disease entities, and the task of extracting resident relations between bacteria and location entities. Compared with the state-of-the-art systems in these tasks, our model improved the F1 scores of the first task by 5.1 in entity recognition and 8.0 in relation extraction, and that of the second task by 9.2 in relation extraction. The proposed model achieves competitive performances with less work on feature engineering. We demonstrate that the model based on neural networks is effective for biomedical entity and relation extraction. In addition, parameter sharing is an alternative method for neural models to jointly process this task. Our work can facilitate the research on biomedical text mining. Traditional relation extraction seeks to identify pre-specified semantic relations within natural language text, while open Information Extraction (Open IE) takes a more general approach, and looks for a variety of relations without restriction to a fixed relation set. With this generalization comes the question, what is a relation? For example, should the more general task be restricted to relations mediated by verbs, nouns, or both? To help answer this question, we propose two levels of subtasks for Open IE. One task is to determine if a sentence potentially contains a relation between two entities? The other task looks to confirm explicit relation words for two entities. We propose multiple SVM models with dependency tree kernels for both tasks. For explicit relation extraction, our system can extract both noun and verb relations. Our results on three datasets show that our system is superior when compared to state-of-the-art systems like REVERB and OLLIE for both tasks. For example, in some experiments our system achieves 33 improvement on nominal relation extraction over OLLIE. In addition we propose an unsupervised rule-based approach which can serve as a strong baseline for Open IE systems. Measuring the similarity between semantic relations that hold among entities is an important and necessary step in various Web related tasks such as relation extraction, information retrieval and analogy detection. For example, consider the case in which a person knows a pair of entities (e.g. Google, YouTube), between which a particular relation holds (e.g. acquisition). The person is interested in retrieving other such pairs with similar relations (e.g. Microsoft, Powerset). Existing keyword-based search engines cannot be applied directly in this case because, in keyword-based search, the goal is to retrieve documents that are relevant to the words used in a query -- not necessarily to the relations implied by a pair of words. We propose a relational similarity measure, using a Web search engine, to compute the similarity between semantic relations implied by two pairs of words. Our method has three components: representing the various semantic relations that exist between a pair of words using automatically extracted lexical patterns, clustering the extracted lexical patterns to identify the different patterns that express a particular semantic relation, and measuring the similarity between semantic relations using a metric learning approach. We evaluate the proposed method in two tasks: classifying semantic relations between named entities, and solving word-analogy questions. The proposed method outperforms all baselines in a relation classification task with a statistically significant average precision score of 0.74. Moreover, it reduces the time taken by Latent Relational Analysis to process 374 word-analogy questions from 9 days to less than 6 hours, with an SAT score of 51 . Many databases contain uncertain and imprecise references to real-world entities. The absence of identifiers for the underlying entities often results in a database which contains multiple references to the same entity. This can lead not only to data redundancy, but also inaccuracies in query processing and knowledge extraction. These problems can be alleviated through the use of entity resolution. Entity resolution involves discovering the underlying entities and mapping each database reference to these entities. Traditionally, entities are resolved using pairwise similarity over the attributes of references. However, there is often additional relational information in the data. Specifically, references to different entities may cooccur. In these cases, collective entity resolution, in which entities for cooccurring references are determined jointly rather than independently, can improve entity resolution accuracy. We propose a novel relational clustering algorithm that uses both attribute and relational information for determining the underlying domain entities, and we give an efficient implementation. We investigate the impact that different relational similarity measures have on entity resolution quality. We evaluate our collective entity resolution algorithm on multiple real-world databases. We show that it improves entity resolution performance over both attribute-based baselines and over algorithms that consider relational information but do not resolve entities collectively. In addition, we perform detailed experiments on synthetically generated data to identify data characteristics that favor collective relational resolution over purely attribute-based algorithms.