Multi-hop Evidence Retrieval for Cross-document Relation Extraction

Keming Lu, I-Hung Hsu, Wenxuan Zhou, Mingyu Derek Ma, Muhao Chen

Findings: Information Extraction Findings Paper

Session 4: Information Extraction (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 4 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan Centre (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan Centre
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords: named entity recognition and relation extraction
TLDR: Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document. This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations, along with the challenge ...
You can open the #paper-P2422 channel in a separate window.
Abstract: Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document. This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations, along with the challenge of multi-hop reasoning on top of entities and evidence scattered in an open set of documents. To combat these challenges, we propose Mr.Cod (Multi-hop evidence retrieval for Cross-document relation extraction), which is a multi-hop evidence retrieval method based on evidence path mining and ranking. We explore multiple variants of retrievers to show evidence retrieval is essential in cross-document RE. We also propose a contextual dense retriever for this setting. Experiments on CodRED show that evidence retrieval with Mr.Cod effectively acquires cross-document evidence and boosts end-to-end RE performance in both closed and open settings.