Contextual Semantic-Guided Entity-Centric GCN for Relation Extraction

Relation extraction tasks aim to predict potential relations between entities in a target sentence. As entity mentions have ambiguity in sentences, some important contextual information can guide the semantic representation of entity mentions to improve the accuracy of relation extraction. However, most existing relation extraction models ignore the semantic guidance of contextual information to entity mentions and treat entity mentions in and the textual context of a sentence equally. This results in low-accuracy relation extractions. To address this problem, we propose a contextual semantic-guided entity-centric graph convolutional network (CEGCN) model that enables entity mentions to obtain semantic-guided contextual information for more accurate relational representations. This model develops a self-attention enhanced neural network to concentrate on the importance and relevance of different words to obtain semantic-guided contextual information. Then, we employ a dependency tree with entities as global nodes and add virtual edges to construct an entity-centric logical adjacency matrix (ELAM). This matrix can enable entities to aggregate the semantic-guided contextual information with a one-layer GCN calculation. The experimental results on the TACRED and SemEval-2010 Task 8 datasets show that our model can efficiently use semantic-guided contextual information to enrich semantic entity representations and outperform previous models.