The clustering-based unsupervised relation discovery method has gradually become one of the important methods of open relation extraction ( OpenRE ) . However , high-dimensional vectors can encode complex linguistic information which leads to the problem that the derived clusters can not explicitly align with the relational semantic classes . In this work , we propose a relationoriented clustering model and use it to identify the novel relations in the unlabeled data . Specifically , to enable the model to learn to cluster relational data , our method leverages the readily available labeled data of pre-defined relations to learn a relationoriented representation . We minimize distance between the instance with same relation by gathering the instances towards their corresponding relation centroids to form a cluster structure , so that the learned representation is cluster-friendly . To reduce the clustering bias on predefined classes , we optimize the model by minimizing a joint objective on both labeled and unlabeled data . Experimental results show that our method reduces the error rate by 29.2 % and 15.7 % , on two datasets respectively , compared with current SOTA methods . Relation extraction ( RE ) , a crucial basic task in the field of information extraction , is of the utmost practical interest to various fields including web search ( Xiong et al . , 2017 ) , knowledge base completion ( Bordes et al . , 2013 ) , and question answering ( Yu et al . , 2017 ) . However , conventional RE paradigms such as supervision and distant supervision are generally designed for pre-defined relations , which can not deal with new emerging relations in the real world . Under this background , open relation extraction ( OpenRE ) has been widely studied for its use Figure 1 : Although both instances S 2 and S 3 express founded relation while S 1 expresses CEO relation , the distance between S 1 and S 2 is still smaller than that between S 2 and S 3 . This is because there may be more similar surface information ( e.g. word overlapping ) or syntactic structure between S 1 and S 2 , thus the derived clusters can not explicitly align with relations . in extracting new emerging relational types from open-domain corpora . The approaches used to handle open relations roughly fall into one of two groups . The first group is open information extraction ( OpenIE ) ( Etzioni et al . , 2008 ; Yates et al . , 2007 ; Fader et al . , 2011 ) , which directly extracts related phrases as representations of different relational types . However , if not properly canonicalized , the extracted relational facts can be redundant and ambiguous . The second group is unsupervised relation discovery ( Yao et al . , 2011 ; Shinyama and Sekine , 2006 ; Simon et al . , 2019 ) . In this type of research , much attention has been focused on unsupervised clustering-based RE methods , which cluster and recognize relations from high-dimensional representations ( Elsahar et al . , 2017 ) . Recently , the self-supervised signals in pretrained language model are further exploited for clustering optimization ( Hu et al . , 2020 ) . However , many studies show that highdimensional embeddings can encode complex linguistic information such as morphological ( Peters et al . , 2018 ) , local syntactic ( Hewitt and Manning , 2019 ) , and longer range semantic information ( Jawahar et al . , 2019 ) . Consequently , the distance of representation is not completely consistent with relational semantic similarity . Although Hu et al . ( 2020 ) use self-supervised signals to optimize clustering , there is still no guarantee that the learned clusters will explicitly align with the desired relational semantic classes ( Xing et al . , 2002 ) . As shown in Figure 1 , we use the method proposed by Hu et al . ( 2020 ) to get the instance representations . Although both instances S 2 and S 3 express the founded relation , the euclidean distance between them is larger than that between S 1 and S 2 , which express different relation . Obviously , the clustering algorithm tends to group instances S 1 and S 2 together , rather than S 2 and S 3 which express the same relation . In this work , we propose a relation-oriented clustering method . To enable the model to learn to cluster relational data , pre-defined relations and their existing labeled instances are leveraged to optimize a non-linear mapping , which transforms high-dimensional entity pair representations into relation-oriented representations . Specifically , we minimize distance between the instances with same relation by gathering the instances representation towards their corresponding relation centroids to form the cluster structure , so that the learned representation is cluster-friendly . In order to reduce the clustering bias on the predefined classes , we iteratively train the entity pair representations by optimizing a joint objective function on the labeled and unlabeled subsets of the data , improving both the supervised classification of the labeled data , and the clustering of the unlabeled data . In addition , the proposed method can be easily extended to incremental learning by classifying the pre-defined and novel relations with a unified classifier , which is often desirable in real-world applications . Our experimental results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for OpenRE . Our codes are publicly available at Github * . To summarize , the main contributions of our work are as follows : ( 1 ) we propose a novel relation-oriented clustering method RoCORE to enable model to learn to cluster relational data ; ( 2 ) the proposed method achieves the incremental learning of unlabeled novel relations , which is often desirable in real-world applications ; ( 3 ) experimental results show that our method reduces * https://github.com / Ac-Zyx / RoCORE . the error rate by 29.2 % and 15.7 % , on two realworld datasets respectively , compared with current state-of-the-art OpenRE methods . In this work , we introduce a relation-oriented clustering method that extends the current unsupervised clustering-based OpenRE method . The proposed method leverages the labeled data of pre-defined relations to learn a relation-oriented representation from which the derived clusters explicitly align with relational classes . Iterative joint training method effectively reduces the unwanted bias on labeled data . In addition , the proposed method can be easily extended to incremental learning of novel relations . Experimental results show that our method outperforms SOTA methods for OpenRE .

Challenge: Even though high-dimensional vectors that can encode complex information used for relation extraction are not guaranteed to be consistent with relational semantic similarity.
Approach: They propose to use available relation labeled data to obtain relation-oriented representation by minimizing the distance between the same relation instances.
Outcome: The proposed approach can reduce error rates significantly from the best models for open relation extraction.