Three birds, one stone: A novel translation based framework for joint entity and relation extraction

Joint entity and relation extraction is an important task in natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. Existing studies mainly focus on three issues: redundant predictions, overlapping triples and relation connections. However, as far as we know, none of them is able to solve the three problems simultaneously in a unified architecture. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel translation based unified framework. Specifically, the proposed framework contains two components: an entity tagger and a relation extractor. The former is used to recognize all candidate head entities and tail entities respectively. The latter predicts relations for every entity pair dynamically through ranking with translation mechanism. To show the superiority of the proposed framework, we instantiate it through the simplest binary entity tagger and TransE algorithm. Extensive experiments over two widely used datasets demonstrate that, even with the simplest components, the proposed framework can still achieve competitive performance with most previous baselines. Moreover, the framework is flexible. It enjoys further performance boost when employing more powerful entity tagger and knowledge graph embedding algorithm. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.