Entity and relation collaborative extraction approach based on multi-head attention and gated mechanism

Entity and relation extraction has been widely studied in natural language processing, and some joint methods have been proposed in recent years. However, existing studies still suffer from two problems. Firstly, the token space information has been fully utilized in those studies, while the label space information is underutilized. However, a few preliminary works have proven that the label space information could contribute to this task. Secondly, the performance of relevant entities detection is still unsatisfactory in entity and relation extraction tasks. In this paper, a new model GANCE (Gated and Attentive Network Collaborative Extracting) is proposed to address these problems. Firstly, GANCE exploits the label space information by applying a gating mechanism, which could improve the performance of the relation extraction. Then, two multi-head attention modules are designed to update the token and token-label fusion representation. In this way, the relevant entities detection could be solved. Experimental results demonstrate that GANCE has better accuracy than several competitive approaches in terms of entity recognition and relation extraction on the CoNLL04 dataset at 90.32% and 73.59%, respectively. Moreover, the F1 score of relation extraction increased by 1.24% over existing approaches in the ADE dataset.