CARE: Co-Attention Network for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction
This work improves information extraction for natural language processing applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing joint extraction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of joint entity and relation extraction by addressing feature confusion and inadequate interaction between subtasks, proposing a co-attention network that outperforms baselines on benchmark datasets like NYT, WebNLG, and SciERC.
Joint entity and relation extraction is the fundamental task of information extraction, consisting of two subtasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. However, most existing joint extraction methods suffer from issues of feature confusion or inadequate interaction between the two subtasks. Addressing these challenges, in this work, we propose a Co-Attention network for joint entity and Relation Extraction (CARE). Our approach includes adopting a parallel encoding strategy to learn separate representations for each subtask, aiming to avoid feature overlap or confusion. At the core of our approach is the co-attention module that captures two-way interaction between the two subtasks, allowing the model to leverage entity information for relation prediction and vice versa, thus promoting mutual enhancement. Through extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets for joint entity and relation extraction (NYT, WebNLG, and SciERC), we demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing baseline models. Our code will be available at https://github.com/kwj0x7f/CARE.