Relation Extraction with Proactive Domain Adaptation Strategy

Relation extraction is an important information extraction task in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as automatic knowledge graph construction, question answering, sentiment analysis, etc. However, relation extraction suffers from inappropriate associations between entities when the background knowledge of corpus is insufficiency. Despite the preprocessed external word vector bases can ease this problem, how to find a single word vector base as domain knowledge that contains all the required knowledge features is a huge challenge, and relation extraction with background knowledge is still open to further optimization. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose Relation Extraction method with Proactive Domain Adaptation Strategy (REPDAS for short) to introduce more knowledge features from different knowledge bases. More specifically, firstly, a convolutional network with a parameter-sharing layer is introduced for relation extraction, and word seeds that are important to relational feature exploitation are proactively picked by an attention mechanism during training. Secondly, the proactively-chosen word seeds and the previous parameter-sharing layer are utilized to establish a map between different domains. Our proposed method selectively avails both background knowledge and contextual features for relation extraction by incorporating the convolutional neural network with the proactively domain adaptation strategy. Experiments show that our method effectively enhances the performance of relation extraction compared with other baselines.