Towards a More Generalized Approach in Open Relation Extraction

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission4616 Authors

Abstract: Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) seeks to identify and extract novel relational facts between named entities from unlabeled data without pre-defined relation schemas. Traditional OpenRE methods typically assume that the unlabeled data consists solely of novel relations or is pre-divided into known and novel instances. However, in real-world scenarios, novel relations are arbitrarily distributed. In this paper, we propose a generalized OpenRE setting that considers unlabeled data as a mixture of both known and novel instances. To address this, we propose MixORE, a two-phase framework that integrates relation classification and clustering to jointly learn known and novel relations. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that MixORE consistently outperforms competitive baselines in known relation classification and novel relation clustering. Our findings contribute to the advancement of generalized OpenRE research and real-world applications. Source code is available.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Information Extraction

Research Area Keywords: relation extraction, open information extraction

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Approaches to low-resource settings, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 4616