TERL: Transformer Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Relation Extraction

Relation Extraction (RE) task aims to discover the semantic relation that holds between two entities and contributes to many applications such as knowledge graph construction and completion. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used for RE task and achieved SOTA results, which are mainly designed with rewards to choose the optimal actions during the training procedure, to improve RE's performance, especially for low-resource conditions. Recent work has shown that offline or online RL can be flexibly formulated as a sequence understanding problem and solved via approaches similar to large-scale pre-training language modeling. To strengthen the ability for understanding the semantic signals interactions among the given text sequence, this paper leverages Transformer architecture for RL-based RE methods, and proposes a generic framework called Transformer Enhanced RL (TERL) towards RE task. Unlike prior RL-based RE approaches that usually fit value functions or compute policy gradients, TERL only outputs the best actions by utilizing a masked Transformer. Experimental results show that the proposed TERL framework can improve many state-of-the-art RL-based RE methods.