Semi-Supervised Convolution Graph Kernels for Relation Extraction

Xia Ning, Yanjun Qi

Abstract: Extracting semantic relations between entities is an important step towards automatic text understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Convolution Graph Kernel (SCGK) method for semantic Relation Extraction (RE) from natural language. By encoding English sentences as dependence graphs among words, SCGK computes kernels (similarities) between sentences using a convolution strategy, i.e., calculating similarities over all possible short single paths from two dependence graphs. Furthermore, SCGK adds three semi-supervised strategies in the kernel calculation to incorporate soft-matches between (1) words, (2) grammatical dependencies, and (3) entire sentences, respectively. From a large unannotated corpus, these semi-supervision steps learn to capture contextual semantic patterns of elements in natural sentences, which therefore alleviate the lack of annotated examples in most RE corpora. Through convolutions and multi-level semi-supervisions, SCGK provides a powerful model to encode both syntactic and semantic evidence existing in natural English sentences, which effectively recovers the target relational patterns of interest. We perform extensive experiments on five RE benchmark datasets which aim to identify interaction relations from biomedical literature. Our results demonstrate that SCGK achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the task of semantic relation extraction.