Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is an active area of research in natural language processing (NLP) concerned with identifying and extracting relationships between entities beyond sentence boundaries. Compared to the more traditional sentence-level relation extraction, DocRE provides a broader context for analysis and is more challenging because it involves identifying relationships that may span multiple sentences or paragraphs. This task has gained increased interest as a viable solution to build and populate knowledge bases automatically from unstructured large-scale documents (e.g., scientific papers, legal contracts, or news articles), in order to have a better understanding of relationships between entities. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in this field, highlighting its different applications in comparison to sentence-level relation extraction.
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Distantly supervised datasets for relation extraction mostly focus on sentence-level extraction, and they cover very few relations. In this work, we propose cross-document relation extraction, where the two entities of a relation tuple appear in two different documents that are connected via a chain of common entities. Following this idea, we create a dataset for two-hop relation extraction, where each chain contains exactly two documents. Our proposed dataset covers a higher number of relations than the publicly available sentence-level datasets. We also propose a hierarchical entity graph co…
Most information extraction methods focus on binary relations expressed within single sentences. In high-value domains, however, $n$-ary relations are of great demand (e.g., drug-gene-mutation interactions in precision oncology). Such relations often involve entity mentions that are far apart in the document, yet existing work on cross-sentence relation extraction is generally confined to small text spans (e.g., three consecutive sentences), which severely limits recall. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale neural architecture for document-level $n$-ary relation extraction. Our system …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations among entity pairs in a document. Typical DocRE methods blindly take the full document as input, while a subset of the sentences in the document, noted as the evidence, are often sufficient for humans to predict the relation of an entity pair. In this paper, we propose an evidence-enhanced framework, Eider, that empowers DocRE by efficiently extracting evidence and effectively fusing the extracted evidence in inference. We first jointly train an RE model with a lightweight evidence extraction model, which is efficien…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Fully understanding narratives often requires identifying events in the context of whole documents and modeling the event relations. However, document-level event extraction is a challenging task as it requires the extraction of event and entity coreference, and capturing arguments that span across different sentences. Existing works on event extraction usually confine on extracting events from single sentences, which fail to capture the relationships between the event mentions at the scale of a document, as well as the event arguments that appear in a different sentence than the event trigger…
Jurtech（律典科技）；Maurer School of Law, Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校莫勒法学院）
Every lawsuit document contains the information about the party's claim, court's analysis, decision and others, and all of this information are helpful to understand the case better and predict the judge's decision on similar case in the future. However, the extraction of these information from the document is difficult because the language is too complicated and sentences varied at length. We treat this problem as a task of sequence labeling, and this paper presents the first research to extract relevant information from the civil lawsuit document in China with the hierarchical RNN framework.
Document-level relation extraction aims to extract relations among entities within a document. Compared with its sentence-level counterpart, Document-level relation extraction requires inference over multiple sentences to extract complex relational triples. Previous research normally complete reasoning through information propagation on the mention-level or entity-level document-graphs, regardless of the correlations between the relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Document-level Relation Extraction model based on a Masked Image Reconstruction network (DRE-MIR), which models infere…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Extracting informative arguments of events from news articles is a challenging problem in information extraction, which requires a global contextual understanding of each document. While recent work on document-level extraction has gone beyond single-sentence and increased the cross-sentence inference capability of end-to-end models, they are still restricted by certain input sequence length constraints and usually ignore the global context between events. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new global neural generation-based framework for document-level event argument extraction by construct…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Event extraction has long been treated as a sentence-level task in the IE community. We argue that this setting does not match human information-seeking behavior and leads to incomplete and uninformative extraction results. We propose a document-level neural event argument extraction model by formulating the task as conditional generation following event templates. We also compile a new document-level event extraction benchmark dataset WikiEvents which includes complete event and coreference annotation. On the task of argument extraction, we achieve an absolute gain of 7.6% F1 and 5.7% F1 over…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Events are inter-related in documents. Motivated by the one-sense-per-discourse theory, we hypothesize that a participant tends to play consistent roles across multiple events in the same document. However recent work on document-level event argument extraction models each individual event in isolation and therefore causes inconsistency among extracted arguments across events, which will further cause discrepancy for downstream applications such as event knowledge base population, question answering, and hypothesis generation. In this work, we formulate event argument consistency as the constr…
Compared with traditional sentence-level relation extraction, document-level relation extraction is a more challenging task where an entity in a document may be mentioned multiple times and associated with multiple relations. However, most methods of document-level relation extraction do not distinguish between mention-level features and entity-level features, and just apply simple pooling operation for aggregating mention-level features into entity-level features. As a result, the distinct semantics between the different mentions of an entity are overlooked. To address this problem, we propos…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tencent（腾讯）
Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to generate auto-labeled data for sentence-level relation extraction (RE), which improves RE performance. However, the existing success of DS cannot be directly transferred to the more challenging document-level relation extraction (DocRE), since the inherent noise in DS may be even multiplied in document level and significantly harm the performance of RE. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pre-trained model for DocRE, which denoises the document-level DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. Experimental results on the large-scale DocRE…
Central University of Finance and Economics（中央财经大学）
Event extraction, the technology that aims to automatically get the structural information from documents, has attracted more and more attention in many fields. Most existing works discuss this issue with the token-level multi-label classification framework by distinguishing the tokens as different roles while ignoring the writing styles of documents. The writing style is a special way of content organizing for documents and it is relative fixed in documents with a special field (e.g. financial, medical documents, etc.). We argue that the writing style contains important clues for judging the …
Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to identify the relations between entities throughout an entire document. It needs complex reasoning skills to synthesize various knowledge such as coreferences and commonsense. Large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) contain a wealth of real-world facts, and can provide valuable knowledge to document-level RE. In this paper, we propose an entity knowledge injection framework to enhance current document-level RE models. Specifically, we introduce coreference distillation to inject coreference knowledge, endowing an RE model with the more general capabili…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Document-level entity-based extraction (EE), aiming at extracting entity-centric information such as entity roles and entity relations, is key to automatic knowledge acquisition from text corpora for various domains. Most document-level EE systems build extractive models, which struggle to model long-term dependencies among entities at the document level. To address this issue, we propose a generative framework for two document-level EE tasks: role-filler entity extraction (REE) and relation extraction (RE). We first formulate them as a template generation problem, allowing models to efficient…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）
Distant supervision (DS) is a promising approach for relation extraction but often suffers from the noisy label problem. Traditional DS methods usually represent an entity pair as a bag of sentences and denoise labels using multi-instance learning techniques. The bag-based paradigm, however, fails to leverage the inter-sentence-level and the entity-level evidence for relation extraction, and their denoising algorithms are often specialized and complicated. In this paper, we propose a new DS paradigm--document-based distant supervision, which models relation extraction as a document-based machi…
Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学）；KI Group GmbH（KI集团有限公司）
Extracting information from documents usually relies on natural language processing methods working on one-dimensional sequences of text. In some cases, for example, for the extraction of key information from semi-structured documents, such as invoice-documents, spatial and formatting information of text are crucial to understand the contextual meaning. Convolutional neural networks are already common in computer vision models to process and extract relationships in multidimensional data. Therefore, natural language processing models have already been combined with computer vision models in th…
Document-level relation extraction (RE), which requires reasoning on multiple entities in different sentences to identify complex inter-sentence relations, is more challenging than sentence-level RE. To extract the complex inter-sentence relations, previous studies usually employ graph neural networks (GNN) to perform inference upon heterogeneous document-graphs. Despite their great successes, these graph-based methods, which normally only consider the words within the mentions in the process of building graphs and reasoning, tend to ignore the non-entity clue words that are not in the mention…
In document-level event extraction (DEE) task, event arguments always scatter across sentences (across-sentence issue) and multiple events may lie in one document (multi-event issue). In this paper, we argue that the relation information of event arguments is of great significance for addressing the above two issues, and propose a new DEE framework which can model the relation dependencies, called Relation-augmented Document-level Event Extraction (ReDEE). More specifically, this framework features a novel and tailored transformer, named as Relation-augmented Attention Transformer (RAAT). RAAT…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Relation Extraction (RE) is a fundamental task of information extraction, which has attracted a large amount of research attention. Previous studies focus on extracting the relations within a sentence or document, while currently researchers begin to explore cross-document RE. However, current cross-document RE methods directly utilize text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple given documents, which brings considerable noisy and non-relevant sentences. Moreover, they utilize all the text paths in a document bag in a coarse-grained way, without considering the connections between th…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（信息通信技术研究所）
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) models generally use graph networks to implicitly model the reasoning skill (i.e., pattern recognition, logical reasoning, coreference reasoning, etc.) related to the relation between one entity pair in a document. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative reasoning framework to explicitly model the paths of these reasoning skills between each entity pair in this document. Thus, a discriminative reasoning network is designed to estimate the relation probability distribution of different reasoning paths based on the constructed graph and vectori…
We revisit the classic problem of document-level role-filler entity extraction (REE) for template filling. We argue that sentence-level approaches are ill-suited to the task and introduce a generative transformer-based encoder-decoder framework (GRIT) that is designed to model context at the document level: it can make extraction decisions across sentence boundaries; is implicitly aware of noun phrase coreference structure, and has the capacity to respect cross-role dependencies in the template structure. We evaluate our approach on the MUC-4 dataset, and show that our model performs substanti…
Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to identify relations between two entities in a given document. Compared with its sentence-level counterpart, document-level RE requires complex reasoning. Previous research normally completed reasoning through information propagation on the mention-level or entity-level document-graph, but rarely considered reasoning at the entity-pair-level.In this paper, we propose a novel model, called Densely Connected Criss-Cross Attention Network (Dense-CCNet), for document-level RE, which can complete logical reasoning at the entity-pair-level. Specifically,…
Peking University（北京大学）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）
Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) is a more challenging task than sentence RE as it often requires reasoning over multiple sentences. Yet, human annotators usually use a small number of sentences to identify the relationship between a given entity pair. In this paper, we present an embarrassingly simple but effective method to heuristically select evidence sentences for document-level RE, which can be easily combined with BiLSTM to achieve good performance on benchmark datasets, even better than fancy graph neural network based methods. We have released our code at https://github.com/And…
Document-level relation extraction is to extract relation facts from a document consisting of multiple sentences, in which pronoun crossed sentences are a ubiquitous phenomenon against a single sentence. However, most of the previous works focus more on mentions coreference resolution except for pronouns, and rarely pay attention to mention-pronoun coreference and capturing the relations. To represent multi-sentence features by pronouns, we imitate the reading process of humans by leveraging coreference information when dynamically constructing a heterogeneous graph to enhance semantic informa…
Document-level information extraction (IE) tasks have recently begun to be revisited in earnest using the end-to-end neural network techniques that have been successful on their sentence-level IE counterparts. Evaluation of the approaches, however, has been limited in a number of dimensions. In particular, the precision/recall/F1 scores typically reported provide few insights on the range of errors the models make. We build on the work of Kummerfeld and Klein (2013) to propose a transformation-based framework for automating error analysis in document-level event and (N-ary) relation extraction…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine the relation between two entities from a document of multiple sentences. Recent studies typically represent the entire document by sequence- or graph-based models to predict the relations of all entity pairs. However, we find that such a model is not robust and exhibits bizarre behaviors: it predicts correctly when an entire test document is fed as input, but errs when non-evidence sentences are removed. To this end, we propose a Sentence Importance Estimation and Focusing (SIEF) framework for DocRE, where we design a sentence import…
Adam Mickiewicz University（亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）；Nicolaus Copernicus University（尼古拉·哥白尼大学）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Samsung R&D Institute Poland（三星波兰研发研究所）
State-of-the-art solutions for Natural Language Processing (NLP) are able to capture a broad range of contexts, like the sentence-level context or document-level context for short documents. But these solutions are still struggling when it comes to longer, real-world documents with the information encoded in the spatial structure of the document, such as page elements like tables, forms, headers, openings or footers; complex page layout or presence of multiple pages. To encourage progress on deeper and more complex Information Extraction (IE) we introduce a new task (named Kleister) with two n…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Università della Svizzera italiana（提契诺大学）
Document-level relation extraction requires integrating information within and across multiple sentences of a document and capturing complex interactions between inter-sentence entities. However, effective aggregation of relevant information in the document remains a challenging research question. Existing approaches construct static document-level graphs based on syntactic trees, co-references or heuristics from the unstructured text to model the dependencies. Unlike previous methods that may not be able to capture rich non-local interactions for inference, we propose a novel model that empow…
National Centre for Text Mining（国家文本挖掘中心）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Toyota Technological Institute（丰田工业大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（人工智能研究中心（AIRC），产业技术综合研究所（AIST））
Document-level relation extraction is a complex human process that requires logical inference to extract relationships between named entities in text. Existing approaches use graph-based neural models with words as nodes and edges as relations between them, to encode relations across sentences. These models are node-based, i.e., they form pair representations based solely on the two target node representations. However, entity relations can be better expressed through unique edge representations formed as paths between nodes. We thus propose an edge-oriented graph neural model for document-lev…
Document-level relation extraction (RE) poses new challenges compared to its sentence-level counterpart. One document commonly contains multiple entity pairs, and one entity pair occurs multiple times in the document associated with multiple possible relations. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques, adaptive thresholding and localized context pooling, to solve the multi-label and multi-entity problems. The adaptive thresholding replaces the global threshold for multi-label classification in the prior work with a learnable entities-dependent threshold. The localized context pooling dir…
A real-world information extraction (IE) system for semi-structured document images often involves a long pipeline of multiple modules, whose complexity dramatically increases its development and maintenance cost. One can instead consider an end-to-end model that directly maps the input to the target output and simplify the entire process. However, such generation approach is known to lead to unstable performance if not designed carefully. Here we present our recent effort on transitioning from our existing pipeline-based IE system to an end-to-end system focusing on practical challenges that …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Google Inc（谷歌公司）；Sutter Health（萨特医疗中心）
The text of clinical notes can be a valuable source of patient information and clinical assessments. Historically, the primary approach for exploiting clinical notes has been information extraction: linking spans of text to concepts in a detailed domain ontology. However, recent work has demonstrated the potential of supervised machine learning to extract document-level codes directly from the raw text of clinical notes. We propose to bridge the gap between the two approaches with two novel syntheses: (1) treating extracted concepts as features, which are used to supplement or replace the text…
Tencent YouTu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Document Information Extraction (DIE) has attracted increasing attention due to its various advanced applications in the real world. Although recent literature has already achieved competitive results, these approaches usually fail when dealing with complex documents with noisy OCR results or mutative layouts. This paper proposes Generative Multi-modal Network (GMN) for real-world scenarios to address these problems, which is a robust multi-modal generation method without predefined label categories. With the carefully designed spatial encoder and modal-aware mask module, GMN can deal with com…
Multiple entities in a document generally exhibit complex inter-sentence relations, and cannot be well handled by existing relation extraction (RE) methods that typically focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entity pairs. In order to accelerate the research on document-level RE, we introduce DocRED, a new dataset constructed from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features: (1) DocRED annotates both named entities and relations, and is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text; (2) DocRED requires reading multiple sentences in a document to ext…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to identify semantic labels among entities within a single document. One major challenge of DocRE is to dig decisive details regarding a specific entity pair from long text. However, in many cases, only a fraction of text carries required information, even in the manually labeled supporting evidence. To better capture and exploit instructive information, we propose a novel expLicit syntAx Refinement and Subsentence mOdeliNg based framework (LARSON). By introducing extra syntactic information, LARSON can model subsentences of arbitrary granularity…
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is the task of identifying all relations between each entity pair in a document. Evidence, defined as sentences containing clues for the relationship between an entity pair, has been shown to help DocRE systems focus on relevant texts, thus improving relation extraction. However, evidence retrieval (ER) in DocRE faces two major issues: high memory consumption and limited availability of annotations. This work aims at addressing these issues to improve the usage of ER in DocRE. First, we propose DREEAM, a memory-efficient approach that adopts evidence …
SKLSDE, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学软件开发环境国家重点实验室）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Document-level Event Extraction (DEE) is particularly tricky due to the two challenges it poses: scattering-arguments and multi-events. The first challenge means that arguments of one event record could reside in different sentences in the document, while the second one reflects one document may simultaneously contain multiple such event records. Motivated by humans' reading cognitive to extract information of interests, in this paper, we propose a method called HRE (Human Reading inspired Extractor for Document Events), where DEE is decomposed into these two iterative stages, rough reading an…
CINNAMON AI；Hung Yen University of Technology and Education（兴安技术教育大学）
This paper introduces a new information extraction model for business documents. Different from prior studies which only base on span extraction or sequence labeling, the model takes into account advantage of both span extraction and sequence labeling. The combination allows the model to deal with long documents with sparse information (the small amount of extracted information). The model is trained end-to-end to jointly optimize the two tasks in a unified manner. Experimental results on four business datasets in English and Japanese show that the model achieves promising results and is signi…
