Techniques for Jointly Extracting Entities and Relations: A Survey

Relation Extraction is an important task in Information Extraction which deals with identifying semantic relations between entity mentions. Traditionally, relation extraction is carried out after entity extraction in a "pipeline" fashion, so that relation extraction only focuses on determining whether any semantic relation exists between a pair of extracted entity mentions. This leads to propagation of errors from entity extraction stage to relation extraction stage. Also, entity extraction is carried out without any knowledge about the relations. Hence, it was observed that jointly performing entity and relation extraction is beneficial for both the tasks. In this paper, we survey various techniques for jointly extracting entities and relations. We categorize techniques based on the approach they adopt for joint extraction, i.e. whether they employ joint inference or joint modelling or both. We further describe some representative techniques for joint inference and joint modelling. We also describe two standard datasets, evaluation techniques and performance of the joint extraction approaches on these datasets. We present a brief analysis of application of a general domain joint extraction approach to a Biomedical dataset. This survey is useful for researchers as well as practitioners in the field of Information Extraction, by covering a broad landscape of joint extraction techniques.