A Decoupling and Aggregating Framework for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations

Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction are two crucial and challenging subtasks in Information Extraction. Despite the successes achieved by the traditional approaches, fundamental research questions remain open. First, most recent studies use parameter sharing for a single subtask or shared features for both two subtasks, ignoring their semantic differences. Second, information interaction mainly focuses on the two subtasks, leaving the fine-grained information interaction among the subtask-specific features of encoding subjects, relations, and objects unexplored. Motivated by the aforementioned limitations, we propose a novel model to jointly extract entities and relations. The main novelties are as follows: 1) We propose to decouple the feature encoding process into three parts, namely encoding subjects, encoding objects, and encoding relations, allowing the use of fine-grained subtask-specific features. 2) We propose novel inter-aggregation and intra-aggregation strategies to enhance the information interaction and construct individual fine-grained subtask-specific features, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms several previous state-of-the-art models. Extensive additional experiments further confirm the effectiveness of our model.