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Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation

Kung-Hsiang Huang, Sam Tang, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021.

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Abstract

Document-level entity-based extraction (EE), aiming at extracting entity-centric information such as entity roles and entity relations, is key to automatic knowledge acquisition from text corpora for various domains. Most document-level EE systems build extractive models, which struggle to model long-term dependencies among entities at the document level. To address this issue, we propose a generative framework for two document-level EE tasks: role-filler entity extraction (REE) and relation extraction (RE). We first formulate them as a template generation problem, allowing models to efficiently capture cross-entity dependencies, exploit label semantics, and avoid the exponential computation complexity of identifying N-ary relations. A novel cross-attention guided copy mechanism, TopK Copy, is incorporated into a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model to enhance the capabilities of identifying key information in the input document. Experiments done on the MUC-4 and SciREX dataset show new state-of-the-art results on REE (+3.26%), binary RE (+4.8%), and 4-ary RE (+2.7%) in F1 score.


Bib Entry

@inproceedings{huang2021tempgen,
  title = {Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation},
  author = {Huang, Kung-Hsiang and Tang, Sam and Peng, Nanyun},
  booktitle = {The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2021}
}

Related Publications

  • Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation

    Kung-Hsiang Huang, Sam Tang, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021.
    Full Text Code Abstract BibTeX Details
    Document-level entity-based extraction (EE), aiming at extracting entity-centric information such as entity roles and entity relations, is key to automatic knowledge acquisition from text corpora for various domains. Most document-level EE systems build extractive models, which struggle to model long-term dependencies among entities at the document level. To address this issue, we propose a generative framework for two document-level EE tasks: role-filler entity extraction (REE) and relation extraction (RE). We first formulate them as a template generation problem, allowing models to efficiently capture cross-entity dependencies, exploit label semantics, and avoid the exponential computation complexity of identifying N-ary relations. A novel cross-attention guided copy mechanism, TopK Copy, is incorporated into a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model to enhance the capabilities of identifying key information in the input document. Experiments done on the MUC-4 and SciREX dataset show new state-of-the-art results on REE (+3.26%), binary RE (+4.8%), and 4-ary RE (+2.7%) in F1 score.
    @inproceedings{huang2021tempgen,
      title = {Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation},
      author = {Huang, Kung-Hsiang and Tang, Sam and Peng, Nanyun},
      booktitle = {The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
      year = {2021}
    }
    
    Details