Exploit Multiple Reference Graphs for Semi-supervised Relation Extraction

Manual annotation of the labeled data for relation extraction is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Semi-supervised methods can offer helping hands for this problem and have aroused great research interests. Existing work focuses on mapping the unlabeled samples to the classes to augment the labeled dataset. However, it is hard to find an overall good mapping function, especially for the samples with complicated syntactic components in one sentence. To tackle this limitation, we propose to build the connection between the unlabeled data and the labeled ones rather than directly mapping the unlabeled samples to the classes. Specifically, we first use three kinds of information to construct reference graphs, including entity reference, verb reference, and semantics reference. The goal is to semantically or lexically connect the unlabeled sample(s) to the labeled one(s). Then, we develop a Multiple Reference Graph (MRefG) model to exploit the reference information for better recognizing high-quality unlabeled samples. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by extensive comparison experiments with the state-of-the-art baselines on two public datasets.