A Novel Hierarchical Binary Tagging Framework for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations

Extracting relational triples from unstructured text is crucial for large-scale knowledge graph construction. However, few existing works excel in solving the overlapping triple problem where multiple relational triples in the same sentence share the same entities. We propose a novel Hierarchical Binary Tagging (HBT) framework derived from a principled problem formulation. Instead of treating relations as discrete labels as in previous works, our new framework models relations as functions that map subjects to objects in a sentence, which naturally handles overlapping triples. Experiments show that the proposed framework already outperforms state-of-the-art methods even its encoder module uses a randomly initialized BERT encoder, showing the power of the new tagging framework. It enjoys further performance boost when employing a pretrained BERT encoder, outperforming the strongest baseline by 25.6 and 45.9 absolute gain in F1-score on two public datasets NYT and WebNLG, respectively. In-depth analysis on different types of overlapping triples shows that the method delivers consistent performance gain in all scenarios.