Curriculum learning for distant supervision relation extraction

Relation extraction under distant supervision leverages the existing knowledge base to label data automatically, thus greatly reduced the consumption of human labors. Although distant supervision is an efficient method to obtain a large amount of labeled data, the training dataset labeled by distant supervision suffers from noise problem resulting in poor generalization ability of the relation extractor. To alleviate the noise problem, we propose a novel relation extraction method based on curriculum learning. Curriculum learning is utilized to guide the training process of relation extractor, specifically through the predefined curriculum-driven mentor network. Mentor network can dynamically adjust the weights of sentences during training, giving lower weights to noisy sentences and higher weights to truly labeled sentences. Relation extractor and mentor network are trained collaboratively to optimize joint objective. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the generalization ability of relation extractor in a noisy environment and obtains better performance for relation extraction.