Deep Neural Network Based Relation Extraction: An Overview
This survey paper is for NLP researchers interested in understanding the landscape of DNN-based relation extraction techniques.
This paper provides an overview of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It categorizes existing DNN-based RE methods into supervised and distant supervision approaches, highlighting their prevalence and reliability.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is semantic relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1) introduces some general concepts, and further 2) gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design sentence encoder and de-noise method. We further 3) cover some novel methods and recent trends as well as discuss possible future research directions for this task.