Relation Classification based on Selective Entity-Aware Attention

Relation classification aims to classify the entity pairs into a certain relation, which is an important task of natural language processing. The latest end-to-end models based on attention mechanism still have shortcomings, i.e., the attention will be gradually weakened when processing long sequences, and they cannot make use of the hidden type information of the entities. To solve these problems, we propose a relation classification model based on the selective entity-aware attention mechanism, which consists of context encoder and entity-aware attention network. In the context encoder, contextual word semantics are learned through self-attention. Entity selection is applied to adapt the fact that different words can determine each other’s importance. Latent types of entities are taken as auxiliary information to make full use of the entities’ hidden features. Experiments on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 dataset and TACRED show that our model outperforms the baselines without implementing any external resources or NLP tools, and the entity-aware attention indeed improve the model’s performance.