# A Comprehensive Survey on Relation Extraction: Recent Advances and New Frontiers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 144 of its 233 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 144)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Learning How to Ask: Querying LMs with Mixtures of Soft Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06599/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [K-BERT: Enabling Language Representation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07606/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: An Evaluation of BERT and ELMo on Ten Benchmarking Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05474/) (2019)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Multimodal Fusion and Vision-Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02477/) (2025)
- [Reinforced Strategy Optimization for Conversational Recommender Systems via Network-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26093/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Weight Grafting: Localizing Finetuned Factual Knowledge in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20746/) (2025)
- [Training on Synthetic Data Beats Real Data in Multimodal Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03025/) (2023)
- [Social Media Fashion Knowledge Extraction as Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16270/) (2023)
- [Relation Extraction in underexplored biomedical domains: A diversity-optimised sampling and synthetic data generation approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06364/) (2023)
- [Rate-Distortion Guided Knowledge Graph Construction from Lecture Notes Using Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14595/) (2025)
- [Toward Federated Large Language Models in Medicine: A Parameter-Efficient Framework for Privacy-Preserving, Multi-Institutional Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22124/) (2026)
- [Maximizing Relation Extraction Potential: A Data-Centric Study to Unveil Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04934/) (2024)
- [Reduction of Supervision for Biomedical Knowledge Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09582/) (2025)
- [Towards Multimodal Graph Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09738/) (2025)
- [SCoRE: Streamlined Corpus-based Relation Extraction using Multi-Label Contrastive Learning and Bayesian kNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06895/) (2025)
- [Multi-Relation Extraction in Entity Pairs using Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22926/) (2025)
- [An LLM + ASP Workflow for Joint Entity-Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12611/) (2025)
- [Hallucination-Resistant Relation Extraction via Dependency-Aware Sentence Simplification and Two-tiered Hierarchical Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14391/) (2025)
- [An LLM-enabled semantic-centric framework to consume privacy policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01716/) (2025)
- [Methods for Knowledge Graph Construction from Text Collections: Development and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25862/) (2026)
- [Few-Shot Biomedical Relation Extraction with Large Language Models: A Viable Alternative to Supervised Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15412/) (2026)
- [Sub-Billion, Super-Frontier: Small Language Models Rival Zero-Shot Frontier LLMs on General and Literary Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22606/) (2026)
- [Quality Metrics for LLM-Generated Asset Administration Shells: A Perturbation-Based Evaluation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07290/) (2026)
- [AAS-RAIL: Improving Information Extraction for Asset Administration Shells through Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07334/) (2026)
- [ConRAG: Lightweight inference of multi-hop relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35193/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Relation extraction (RE) involves identifying the relations between entities from underlying content. RE serves as the foundation for many natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval applications, such as knowledge graph completion and question answering. In recent years, deep neural networks have dominated the field of RE and made noticeable progress. Subsequently, the large pre-trained language models have taken the state-of-the-art RE to a new level. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing deep learning techniques for RE. First, we introduce RE resources, including datasets and evaluation metrics. Second, we propose a new taxonomy to categorize existing works from three perspectives, i.e., text representation, context encoding, and triplet prediction. Third, we discuss several important challenges faced by RE and summarize potential techniques to tackle these challenges. Finally, we outline some promising future directions and prospects in this field. This survey is expected to facilitate researchers' collaborative efforts to address the challenges of real-world RE systems.