Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Transformer Pre-training

17 Sep 2019  ·  Markus Eberts, Adrian Ulges ·

We introduce SpERT, an attention model for span-based joint entity and relation extraction. Our key contribution is a light-weight reasoning on BERT embeddings, which features entity recognition and filtering, as well as relation classification with a localized, marker-free context representation. The model is trained using strong within-sentence negative samples, which are efficiently extracted in a single BERT pass. These aspects facilitate a search over all spans in the sentence. In ablation studies, we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training, strong negative sampling and localized context. Our model outperforms prior work by up to 2.6% F1 score on several datasets for joint entity and relation extraction.

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Results from the Paper


 Ranked #1 on Joint Entity and Relation Extraction on SciERC (Cross Sentence metric)

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Relation Extraction Adverse Drug Events (ADE) Corpus SpERT (with overlap) RE+ Macro F1 78.84 # 12
NER Macro F1 89.28 # 9
Relation Extraction Adverse Drug Events (ADE) Corpus SpERT (without overlap) RE+ Macro F1 79.24 # 11
NER Macro F1 89.25 # 10
Relation Extraction CoNLL04 SpERT NER Macro F1 86.25 # 3
RE+ Micro F1 71.47 # 7
RE+ Macro F1 72.87 # 3
NER Micro F1 88.94 # 6
Joint Entity and Relation Extraction SciERC SpERT Entity F1 70.33 # 2
Cross Sentence No # 1
Named Entity Recognition (NER) SciERC SpERT F1 70.33 # 2
Joint Entity and Relation Extraction SciERC SpERT (with overlap) Entity F1 70.3 # 3
Relation F1 50.84 # 4
Cross Sentence No # 1

Methods