Kohei Makino

Kohei Makino, Makoto Miwa, Yutaka Sasaki

This paper addresses a crucial challenge in retrieval-augmented generation-based relation extractors; the end-to-end training is not applicable to conventional retrieval-augmented generation due to the non-differentiable nature of instance retrieval. This problem prevents the instance retrievers from being optimized for the relation extraction task, and conventionally it must be trained with an objective different from that for relation extraction. To address this issue, we propose a novel End-to-end Trainable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (ETRAG), which allows end-to-end optimization of the entire model, including the retriever, for the relation extraction objective by utilizing a differentiable selection of the $k$ nearest instances. We evaluate the relation extraction performance of ETRAG on the TACRED dataset, which is a standard benchmark for relation extraction. ETRAG demonstrates consistent improvements against the baseline model as retrieved instances are added. Furthermore, the analysis of instances retrieved by the end-to-end trained retriever confirms that the retrieved instances contain common relation labels or entities with the query and are specialized for the target task. Our findings provide a promising foundation for future research on retrieval-augmented generation and the broader applications of text generation in Natural Language Processing.

Kohei Makino, Makoto Miwa, Yutaka Sasaki

In this paper, we propose a novel edge-editing approach to extract relation information from a document. We treat the relations in a document as a relation graph among entities in this approach. The relation graph is iteratively constructed by editing edges of an initial graph, which might be a graph extracted by another system or an empty graph. The way to edit edges is to classify them in a close-first manner using the document and temporally-constructed graph information; each edge is represented with a document context information by a pretrained transformer model and a graph context information by a graph convolutional neural network model. We evaluate our approach on the task to extract material synthesis procedures from materials science texts. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach in editing the graphs initialized by our in-house rule-based system and empty graphs.

Fusataka Kuniyoshi, Kohei Makino, Jun Ozawa et al.

The synthesis process is essential for achieving computational experiment design in the field of inorganic materials chemistry. In this work, we present a novel corpus of the synthesis process for all-solid-state batteries and an automated machine reading system for extracting the synthesis processes buried in the scientific literature. We define the representation of the synthesis processes using flow graphs, and create a corpus from the experimental sections of 243 papers. The automated machine-reading system is developed by a deep learning-based sequence tagger and simple heuristic rule-based relation extractor. Our experimental results demonstrate that the sequence tagger with the optimal setting can detect the entities with a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.826, while the rule-based relation extractor can achieve high performance with a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.887.