# A Sample-Based Training Method for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Pre-Trained Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07512 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07512/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [Enriching Pre-trained Language Model with Entity Information for Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08284/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2010 Task 8: Multi-Way Classification of Semantic Relations Between Pairs of Nominals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10422/) (2019)
- [OpenNRE: An Open and Extensible Toolkit for Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13078/) (2019)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Relation Classification from Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08013/) (2018)
- [Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08646/) (2019)
- [Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09927/) (2018)
- [Distant Supervision Relation Extraction with Intra-Bag and Inter-Bag Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00143/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention Enhanced Selective Gate with Entity-Aware Embedding for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11899/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the standard learning paradigm for distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE). However, due to relation extraction being performed at bag level, MIL has significant hardware requirements for training when coupled with large sentence encoders such as deep transformer neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling method for DSRE that relaxes these hardware requirements. In the proposed method, we limit the number of sentences in a batch by randomly sampling sentences from the bags in the batch. However, this comes at the cost of losing valid sentences from bags. To alleviate the issues caused by random sampling, we use an ensemble of trained models for prediction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using our proposed learning setting to fine-tuning BERT on the widely NYT dataset. Our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of AUC and P@N metrics.