Generating Labeled Data for Relation Extraction: A Meta Learning Approach with Joint GPT-2 Training

Relation Extraction (RE) is the task of identifying semantic relation between real-world entities mentioned in text. Despite significant progress in RE research, a remaining challenge for RE concerns the lack of training data for data-hungry deep learning models. Cost of annotation and difficulty of the task are among hindrance to collect a large-scale RE dataset in different domains. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework to automatically generate labeled data for RE. Our framework presents the pre-trained language model GPT-2 for data generation. In addition, to optimize the generated samples for an RE model, we introduce a meta learning approach to allow the GPT-2 model to be updated during the training process for RE. In particular, to leverage the feedback from the RE model to improve the data generation from GPT-2, we propose a novel reward function to update the GPT-2 model with REINFORCE, seeking to promote the similarity of the RE loss function’s gradients computed for generated data and a meta development set. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets to produce state-of-the-art performance for RE.