NS-Hunter: BERT-Cloze Based Semantic Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Classification

“Distant supervision can generate large-scale relation classification data quickly and economi-cally. However a great number of noise sentences are introduced which can not express their labeled relations. By means of pre-trained language model BERT’s powerful function in this paper we propose a BERT-based semantic denoising approach for distantly supervised relation classification. In detail we define an entity pair as a source entity and a target entity. For the specific sentences whose target entities in BERT-vocabulary (one-token word) we present the differences of dependency between two entities for noise and non-noise sentences. For general sentences whose target entity is multi-token word we further present the differences of last hid-den states of [MASK]-entity (MASK-lhs for short) in BERT for noise and non-noise sentences.We regard the dependency and MASK-lhs in BERT as two semantic features of sentences. With BERT we capture the dependency feature to discriminate specific sentences first then capturethe MASK-lhs feature to denoise distant supervision datasets. We propose NS-Hunter a noveldenoising model which leverages BERT-cloze ability to capture the two semantic features andintegrates above functions. According to the experiment on NYT data our NS-Hunter modelachieves the best results in distant supervision denoising and sentence-level relation classification. Keywords: Distant supervision relation classification semantic denoisingIntroduction”