Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network with a Novel Multilabel Focal Loss for Document-Level Relation Extraction

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rise in interest in document-level relation extraction, which is defined as extracting all relations between entities in multiple sentences of a document. Typically, there are multiple mentions corresponding to a single entity in this context. Previous research predominantly employed a holistic representation for each entity to predict relations, but this approach often overlooks valuable information contained in fine-grained entity mentions. We contend that relation prediction and inference should be grounded in specific entity mentions rather than abstract entity concepts. To address this, our paper proposes a two-stage mention-level framework based on an enhanced heterogeneous graph attention network for document-level relation extraction. Our framework employs two different strategies to model intra-sentential and inter-sentential relations between fine-grained entity mentions, yielding local mention representations for intra-sentential relation prediction and global mention representations for inter-sentential relation prediction. For inter-sentential relation prediction and inference, we propose an enhanced heterogeneous graph attention network to better model the long-distance semantic relationships and design an entity-coreference path-based inference strategy to conduct relation inference. Moreover, we introduce a novel cross-entropy-based multilabel focal loss function to address the class imbalance problem and multilabel prediction simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our framework. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the existing methods.