Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction in Federated Settings

Dianbo Sui, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

Keywords: Distant Supervision, Relation Extraction, Federated Learning

Abstract: Distant supervision is widely used in relation extraction in order to create a large-scale training dataset by aligning a knowledge base with unstructured text. Most existing studies in this field have assumed there is a great deal of centralized unstructured text. However, in practice, text may be distributed on different platforms and cannot be centralized due to privacy restrictions. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate distant supervision in the federated learning paradigm, which decouples the training of the model from the need for direct access to the raw text. However, overcoming label noise of distant supervision becomes more difficult in federated settings, because the sentences containing the same entity pair scatter around different platforms. In this paper, we propose a federated denoising framework to suppress label noise in federated settings. The core of this framework is a multiple instance learning based denoising method that is able to select reliable sentences via cross-platform collaboration. Various experimental results on New York Times dataset and miRNA gene regulation relation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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One-sentence Summary: We propose a federated denoising framework to suppress distantly supervised label noise in federated settings.

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2008.05049/code)

Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=sjIDLuHWn