Exploiting global context and external knowledge for distantly supervised relation extraction

Distantly supervised relation extraction aims to obtain relational facts from unstructured texts. Although distant supervision can automatically generate labeled training instances, it inevitably suffers from the wrong-label problem. Most of the current work is based on the bag-level for solving the noise problem, where a bag is composed of multiple sentences containing mentions of the same entity pair. However, previous studies mostly represent sentences from a single perspective, wherein insufficient modeling of global information restricts the effectiveness of denoising. In this study, we propose a novel distantly supervised relation extraction approach that incorporates the global contextual information of sentences to guide the denoising process and generate an effective bag-level representation. Simultaneously, knowledge-aware word embeddings were generated to enrich sentence-level representations by introducing both structured knowledge from external knowledge graphs and semantic knowledge from the corpus. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both versions of the large-scale benchmark New York Times dataset. In addition, the differences between the two versions of the dataset were investigated through further comparative experiments.