@inproceedings{zheng-etal-2023-jointprop,
    title = "Jointprop: Joint Semi-supervised Learning for Entity and Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation",
    author = "Zheng, Yandan  and
      Hao, Anran  and
      Luu, Anh Tuan",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.813",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.813",
    pages = "14541--14555",
    abstract = "Semi-supervised learning has been an important approach to address challenges in extracting entities and relations from limited data. However, current semi-supervised works handle the two tasks (i.e., Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction) separately and ignore the cross-correlation of entity and relation instances as well as the existence of similar instances across unlabeled data. To alleviate the issues, we propose Jointprop, a Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation framework for joint semi-supervised entity and relation extraction, which captures the global structure information between individual tasks and exploits interactions within unlabeled data. Specifically, we construct a unified span-based heterogeneous graph from entity and relation candidates and propagate class labels based on confidence scores. We then employ a propagation learning scheme to leverage the affinities between labelled and unlabeled samples. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches on NER and RE tasks. We show that the joint semi-supervised learning of the two tasks benefits from their codependency and validates the importance of utilizing the shared information between unlabeled data.",
}

Semi-supervised learning has been an important approach to address challenges in extracting entities and relations from limited data. However, current semi-supervised works handle the two tasks (i.e., Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction) separately and ignore the cross-correlation of entity and relation instances as well as the existence of similar instances across unlabeled data. To alleviate the issues, we propose Jointprop, a Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation framework for joint semi-supervised entity and relation extraction, which captures the global structure information between individual tasks and exploits interactions within unlabeled data. Specifically, we construct a unified span-based heterogeneous graph from entity and relation candidates and propagate class labels based on confidence scores. We then employ a propagation learning scheme to leverage the affinities between labelled and unlabeled samples. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches on NER and RE tasks. We show that the joint semi-supervised learning of the two tasks benefits from their codependency and validates the importance of utilizing the shared information between unlabeled data.
Zheng, Y an Hao, Anran Luu, Anh Tuan
Jointprop: Joint Semi-supervised Learning for Entity and Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Graph-based Propagation