Noisy Or-based model for Relation Extraction using Distant Supervision

Distant supervision, a paradigm of relation extraction where training data is created by aligning facts in a database with a large unannotated corpus, is an attractive approach for training relation extractors. Various models are proposed in recent literature to align the facts in the database to their mentions in the corpus. In this paper, we discuss and critically analyse a popular alignment strategy called the “at least one” heuristic. We provide a simple, yet effective relaxation to this strategy. We formulate the inference procedures in training as integer linear programming (ILP) problems and implement the relaxation to the “at least one ” heuristic via a soft constraint in this formulation. Empirically, we demonstrate that this simple strategy leads to a better performance under certain settings over the existing approaches.