Relation classification via BERT with piecewise convolution and focal loss

PLoS One. 2021 Sep 10;16(9):e0257092. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257092. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Recent relation extraction models' architecture are evolved from the shallow neural networks to natural language model, such as convolutional neural networks or recurrent neural networks to Bert. However, these methods did not consider the semantic information in the sequence or the distance dependence problem, the internal semantic information may contain the useful knowledge which can help relation classification. Focus on these problems, this paper proposed a BERT-based relation classification method. Compare with the existing Bert-based architecture, the proposed model can obtain the internal semantic information between entity pair and solve the distance semantic dependence better. The pre-trained BERT model after fine tuning is used in this paper to abstract the semantic representation of sequence, then adopt the piecewise convolution to obtain semantic information which influence the extraction results. Compare with the existing methods, the proposed method can achieve a better accuracy on relational extraction task because of the internal semantic information extracted in the sequence. While, the generalization ability is still a problem that cannot be ignored, and the numbers of the relationships are difference between different categories. In this paper, the focal loss function is adopted to solve this problem by assigning a heavy weight to less number or hard classify categories. Finally, comparing with the existing methods, the F1 metric of the proposed method can reach a superior result 89.95% on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 dataset.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Databases as Topic
  • Deep Learning
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Semantics

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U1836108 and U1936216, and supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Beijing university of posts and telecommunications) for Action Plan under Grant 2021XD-A11-1. These awards were received by Ru Zhang and Jianyi Liu. The funders played a role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, and preparation of the manuscript.