# On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06127/) (2019)
- [Document-Level Relation Extraction with Adaptive Thresholding and Localized Context Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11304/) (2020)
- [Measure and Improve Robustness in NLP Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08313/) (2021)
- [Double Graph Based Reasoning for Document-level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13752/) (2020)
- [Document-level Relation Extraction as Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03618/) (2021)
- [Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction beyond the Sentence Boundary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04873/) (2016)
- [DREEAM: Guiding Attention with Evidence for Improving Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08675/) (2023)
- [An End-to-end Model for Entity-level Relation Extraction using Multi-instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05980/) (2021)
- [DWIE: an entity-centric dataset for multi-task document-level information extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12626/) (2020)
- [Eider: Empowering Document-level Relation Extraction with Efficient Evidence Extraction and Inference-stage Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08657/) (2021)
- [RockNER: A Simple Method to Create Adversarial Examples for Evaluating the Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05620/) (2021)
- [A sequence-to-sequence approach for document-level relation extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01098/) (2022)
- [SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12093/) (2021)
- [Does Recommend-Revise Produce Reliable Annotations? An Analysis on Missing Instances in DocRED](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07980/) (2022)
- [On the Robustness of Reading Comprehension Models to Entity Renaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08555/) (2021)
- [Document-Level Relation Extraction with Sentences Importance Estimation and Focusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12679/) (2022)
- [Know Thy Strengths: Comprehensive Dialogue State Tracking Diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08321/) (2021)
- [RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15743/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Robustness of Generative Search Engine on Adversarial Factual Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12077/) (2024)
- [None Class Ranking Loss for Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00476/) (2022)
- [Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14470/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11029/) (2023)
- [HistRED: A Historical Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04285/) (2023)

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

- [Relation Extraction or Pattern Matching? Unravelling the Generalisation Limits of Language Models for Biographical RE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12533/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Driven by the demand for cross-sentence and large-scale relation extraction, document-level relation extraction (DocRE) has attracted increasing research interest. Despite the continuous improvement in performance, we find that existing DocRE models which initially perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. To this end, we systematically investigate the robustness of DocRE models to entity name variations in this work. We first propose a principled pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. By applying the pipeline to DocRED and Re-DocRED datasets, we construct two novel benchmarks named Env-DocRED and Env-Re-DocRED for robustness evaluation. Experimental results show that both three representative DocRE models and two in-context learned large language models consistently lack sufficient robustness to entity name variations, particularly on cross-sentence relation instances and documents with more entities. Finally, we propose an entity variation robust training method which not only improves the robustness of DocRE models but also enhances their understanding and reasoning capabilities. We further verify that the basic idea of this method can be effectively transferred to in-context learning for DocRE as well.