# Open-world Semi-supervised Generalized Relation Discovery Aligned in a Real-world Setting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Larger language models do in-context learning differently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03846/) (2023)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10147/) (2018)
- [DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06127/) (2019)
- [Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03526/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Relation Extraction using LSTMs on Sequences and Tree Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00770/) (2016)
- [Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03743/) (2017)
- [Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01923/) (2020)
- [Re-TACRED: Addressing Shortcomings of the TACRED Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08398/) (2021)
- [ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15022/) (2020)
- [Generative Dual Adversarial Network for Generalized Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04857/) (2018)
- [Relation Classification via Recurrent Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01006/) (2015)
- [ZS-BERT: Towards Zero-Shot Relation Extraction with Attribute Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04697/) (2021)
- [SelfORE: Self-supervised Relational Feature Learning for Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02438/) (2020)
- [UCTopic: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Phrase Representations and Topic Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13469/) (2022)
- [ZeroShotCeres: Zero-Shot Relation Extraction from Semi-Structured Webpages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07105/) (2020)
- [A Unified approach for Conventional Zero-shot, Generalized Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08653/) (2017)
- [Consistent Representation Learning for Continual Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02721/) (2022)
- [A Relation-Oriented Clustering Method for Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07205/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07174/) (2018)
- [Improving Continual Relation Extraction through Prototypical Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04513/) (2022)
- [Active Relation Discovery: Towards General and Label-aware Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04215/) (2022)
- [Open Relation and Event Type Discovery with Type Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00178/) (2022)
- [MedDistant19: Towards an Accurate Benchmark for Broad-Coverage Biomedical Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04779/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Category Discovery: An Open-World Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22542/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-world Relation Extraction (OpenRE) has recently garnered significant attention. However, existing approaches tend to oversimplify the problem by assuming that all unlabeled texts belong to novel classes, thereby limiting the practicality of these methods. We argue that the OpenRE setting should be more aligned with the characteristics of real-world data. Specifically, we propose two key improvements: (a) unlabeled data should encompass known and novel classes, including hard-negative instances; and (b) the set of novel classes should represent long-tail relation types. Furthermore, we observe that popular relations such as titles and locations can often be implicitly inferred through specific patterns, while long-tail relations tend to be explicitly expressed in sentences. Motivated by these insights, we present a novel method called KNoRD (Known and Novel Relation Discovery), which effectively classifies explicitly and implicitly expressed relations from known and novel classes within unlabeled data. Experimental evaluations on several Open-world RE benchmarks demonstrate that KNoRD consistently outperforms other existing methods, achieving significant performance gains.