Prompt Language Learner with Trigger Generation for Dialogue Relation Extraction

Abstract

Dialogue relation extraction identifies semantic relations between entity pairs in dialogues. This research explores a methodology harnessing the potential of prompt-based fine-tuning paired with a trigger-generation approach. Capitalizing on the intrinsic knowledge of pre-trained language models, this strategy employs triggers that underline the relation between entities decisively. In particular, diverging from the conventional extractive methods seen in earlier research, our study leans towards a generative manner for trigger generation. The dialogue-based relation extraction (DialogeRE) benchmark dataset features multi-utterance environments of colloquial speech by multiple speakers, making it critical to capture meaningful clues for inferring relational facts. In the benchmark, empirical results reveal significant performance boosts in few-shot scenarios, where the availability of examples is notably limited. Nevertheless, the scarcity of ground-truth triggers for training hints at potential further refinements in the trigger-generation module, especially when ample examples are present. When evaluating the challenges of dialogue relation extraction, combining prompt-based learning with trigger generation offers pronounced improvements in both full-shot and few-shot scenarios. Specifically, integrating a meticulously crafted manual initialization method with the prompt-based model—considering prior distributional insights and relation class semantics—substantially surpasses the baseline. However, further advancements in trigger generation are warranted, especially in data-abundant contexts, to maximize performance enhancements.