Section: New Results

A convex relaxation for weakly supervised relation extraction

Participant : Edouard Grave.

A promising approach to relation extraction, called weak or distant supervision, exploits an existing database of facts as training data, by aligning it to an unlabeled collection of text documents. Using this approach, the task of relation extraction can easily be scaled to hundreds of different relationships. However, distant supervision leads to a challenging multiple instance, multiple label learning problem. Most of the proposed solutions to this problem are based on non-convex formulations, and are thus prone to local minima. In this article, we propose a new approach to the problem of weakly supervised relation extraction, based on discriminative clustering and leading to a convex formulation. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a challenging dataset introduced in 2010.