Enhancing Semantic Relation Classification With Shortest Dependency Path Reasoning

Relation Classification (RC) is a basic and essential task of Natural Language Processing. Existing RC methods can be classified into two categories: sequence-based methods and dependency-based methods. Sequence-based methods identify the target relation based on the overall semantics of the whole sentence, which will inevitably introduce noisy features. Dependency-based methods extract indicative word-level features from the Shortest Dependency Path (SDP) between given entities and attempt to establish a statistical association between the words and the target relations. This pattern relatively eliminates the influence of noisy features and achieves a robust performance on long sentences. Nevertheless, we observe that majority of relation classification processes involve complex semantic reasoning which is hard to be achieved based on the word-level statistical association. To solve this problem, we categorize all relations into atomic relations and composed-relations. The atomic relations are the basic relations that can be identified based on the word-level features, while the composed-relation requires to be deducted from multiple atomic relations. Correspondingly, we propose the Atomic Relation Encoding and Reasoning Model (ATERM). In the atomic relation encoding stage, ATERM groups the word-level features and encodes multiple atomic relations in parallel. In the atomic relation reasoning stage, ATERM establishes the atomic relation chain where relation-level features are extracted to identify composed-relations. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the three most popular relation classification datasets - TACRED, TACRED-Revisit, and SemEval 2010 task 8 with significant improvements.