Does it Really Generalize Well on Unseen Data? Systematic Evaluation of Relational Triple Extraction Methods

The ability to extract entities and their relations from unstructured text is essential for the automated maintenance of large-scale knowledge graphs. To keep a knowledge graph up-to-date, an extractor needs not only the ability to recall the triples it encountered during training, but also the ability to extract the new triples from the context that it has never seen before. In this paper, we show that although existing extraction models are able to easily memorize and recall already seen triples, they cannot generalize effectively for unseen triples. This alarming observation was previously unknown due to the composition of the test sets of the go-to benchmark datasets, which turns out to contain only 2% unseen data, rendering them incapable to measure the generalization performance. To separately measure the generalization performance from the memorization performance, we emphasize unseen data by rearranging datasets, sifting out training instances, or augmenting test sets. In addition to that, we present a simple yet effective augmentation technique to promote generalization of existing extraction models, and experimentally confirm that the proposed method can significantly increase the generalization performance of existing models.