Enhancing Open N-ary Information Extraction using relation embedding and multihead relation attention mechanism

Abstract

Open Information Extraction (Open IE) is the task of identifying structured and machine-readable information from natural language text within an open domain context. This research area has gained significant importance in the field of natural language processing (NLP), attracting considerable attention for its potential to extract valuable information from unstructured textual data. Previous investigations heavily relied on manual extraction patterns and various NLP tools. While these methods often produce errors that accumulate and propagate throughout the systems, ultimately affecting the accuracy of the results. Moreover, recent Open IE studies have focused on extracting binary relations involving two entities. However, these binary approaches occasionally lead to the omission of essential information in the text, preventing a deeper comprehension of the content. This limitation arises from the fact that real-world relations often involve multiple entities, but binary approaches may oversimplify these relations and miss additional details crucial for a thorough understanding of text. To address these challenges, our study introduces an innovative system called “Open N-ary Information EXtraction (ONIEX).” This system incorporates two novel techniques: multihead relation attention mechanism and relation embedding. Multihead relation attention, in combination with relation embedding, enables the system to focus on relations extracted through the SpanBERT model and accurately identify associated entities for each relation. The ONIEX system's superior performance is substantiated through extensive experiments conducted on the OpenIE4 and LSOIE datasets, benchmark datasets for Open n-ary Information Extraction (Open n-ary IE). The results demonstrate the superiority of the ONIEX system over the existing state-of-the-art systems. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.