Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction

Hong Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Conventional approaches to relation extraction usually require a fixed set of pre-defined relations. Such requirement is hard to meet in many real applications, especially when new data and relations are emerging incessantly and it is computationally expensive to store all data and re-train the whole model every time new data and relations come in. We formulate such challenging problem as lifelong relation extraction and investigate memory-efficient incremental learning methods without catastrophically forgetting knowledge learned from previous tasks. We first investigate a modified version of the stochastic gradient methods with a replay memory, which surprisingly outperforms recent state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods. We further propose to improve this approach to alleviate the forgetting problem by anchoring the sentence embedding space. Specifically, we utilize an explicit alignment model to mitigate the sentence embedding distortion of learned model when training on new data and new relations. Experiment results on multiple benchmarks show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art lifelong learning approaches.
Anthology ID:
N19-1086
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
796–806
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1086
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1086
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hong Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 796–806, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction (Wang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1086.pdf
Code
 hongwang600/Lifelong_Relation_Detection +  additional community code
Data
CIFAR-100FewRelSimpleQuestions