CANDiS: Coupled & Attention-Driven Neural Distant Supervision

Abstract: Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction uses heuristically aligned text data with an existing knowledge base as training data. The unsupervised nature of this technique allows it to scale to web-scale relation extraction tasks, at the expense of noise in the training data. Previous work has explored relationships among instances of the same entity-pair to reduce this noise, but relationships among instances across entity-pairs have not been fully exploited. We explore the use of inter-instance couplings based on verb-phrase and entity type similarities. We propose a novel technique, CANDiS, which casts distant supervision using inter-instance coupling into an end-to-end neural network model. CANDiS incorporates an attention module at the instance-level to model the multi-instance nature of this problem. CANDiS outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques on a standard benchmark dataset.