Addressing the challenges of open n-ary relation extraction with a deep learning-driven approach

Abstract

Open relation extraction is a critical task in natural language processing aimed at automatically extracting relations between entities in open-domain corpora. Most existing systems focus on extracting binary relations (relations between two entities) while extracting more complex n-ary relations (involving more than two entities) remains a significant challenge. Additionally, many previous systems rely on hand-crafted patterns and natural language processing tools, which result in error accumulation and reduced accuracy. The current study proposes a novel approach to open n-ary relation extraction that leverages recent advancements in deep learning architectures. This approach addresses the limitations of existing open relation extraction systems, particularly their reliance on hand-crafted patterns and their focus on binary relations. It utilizes SpanBERT to capture relational patterns from text data directly and introduces entity embedding vectors to create distinct representations of entities within sentences. These vectors enhance the proposed system's understanding of the entities within the input sentence, leading to more accurate relation extraction. Notably, the proposed system in the present study achieves an F1-score of 89.79 and 92.67 on the LSOIE-wiki and OpenIE4 datasets, outperforming the best existing models by over 12% and 10%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in addressing the challenges of open n-ary relation extraction. © 2024 Elsevier Inc.