Multi-instance multi-label learning for relation extraction

Distant supervision for relation extraction (RE) - gathering training data by aligning a database of facts with text - is an efficient approach to scale RE to thousands of different relations. However, this introduces a challenging learning scenario where the relation expressed by a pair of entities found in a sentence is unknown. For example, a sentence containing Balzac and France may express BornIn or Died, an unknown relation, or no relation at all. Because of this, traditional supervised learning, which assumes that each example is explicitly mapped to a label, is not appropriate. We propose a novel approach to multi-instance multi-label learning for RE, which jointly models all the instances of a pair of entities in text and all their labels using a graphical model with latent variables. Our model performs competitively on two difficult domains.