CID-GCN: An Effective Graph Convolutional Networks for Chemical-Induced Disease Relation Extraction

Abstract

Automatic extraction of chemical-induced disease (CID) relation from unstructured text is of essential importance for disease treatment and drug development. In this task, some relational facts can only be inferred from the document rather than single sentence. Recently, researchers investigate graph-based approaches to extract relations across sentences. It iteratively combines the information from neighbor nodes to model the interactions in entity mentions that exist in different sentences. Despite their success, one severe limitation of the graph-based approaches is the over-smoothing problem, which decreases the model distinguishing ability. In this paper, we propose CID-GCN, an effective Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with gating mechanism, for CID relation extraction. Specifically, we construct a heterogeneous graph which contains mention, sentence and entity nodes. Then, the graph convolution operation is employed to aggregate interactive information on the constructed graph. Particularly, we combine gating mechanism with the graph convolution operation to address the over-smoothing problem. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the baselines.

Keywords: chemical-induced disease; document level; graph convolutional network; inter-sentential relation; relation extraction.