FREDA: Few-Shot Relation Extraction Based on Data Augmentation

Abstract

The primary task of few-shot relation extraction is to quickly learn the features of relation classes from a few labelled instances and predict the semantic relations between entity pairs in new instances. Most existing few-shot relation extraction methods do not fully utilize the relation information features in sentences, resulting in difficulties in improving the performance of relation classification. Some researchers have attempted to incorporate external information, but the results have been unsatisfactory when applied to different domains. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes triple information for data augmentation, which can alleviate the issue of insufficient instances and possesses strong domain adaptation capabilities. Firstly, we extract relation and entity pairs from the instances in the support set, forming relation triple information. Next, the sentence information and relation triple information are encoded using the same sentence encoder. Then, we construct an interactive attention module to enable the query set instances to interact separately with the support set instances and relation triple instances. The module pays greater attention to highly interactive parts between instances and assigns them higher weights. Finally, we merge the interacted support set representation and relation triple representation. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a method that utilizes triple information for data augmentation in relation extraction. In our experiments on the standard datasets FewRel1.0 and FewRel2.0 (domain adaptation), we observed substantial improvements without including external information.