{Huaiyu Wan Youfang Lin Yi Zhao Jianwei Gao}

Abstract

Relation classification is one of the most important tasks in the field of information extraction, and also a key component of systems that require relational understanding of unstructured text. Existing relation classification approaches mainly rely on exploiting external resources and background knowledge to improve the performance and ignore the correlations between entity pairs which are helpful for relation classification. We present the concept of entity pair graph to represent the correlations between entity pairs and propose a novel entity pair graph based neural network (EPGNN) model, relying on graph convolutional network to capture the topological features of an entity pair graph. EPGNN combines sentence semantic features generated by pre-trained BERT model with graph topological features for relation classification. Our proposed model makes full use of a given corpus and forgoes the need of external resources and background knowledge. The experimental results on two widely used dataset: SemEval 2010 Task 8 and ACE 2005, show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.