ER-LAC: Span-Based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction Model with Multi-Level Lexical and Attention on Context Features

Abstract

In recent years, joint entity–relation extraction (ERE) models have become a hot research topic in natural language processing (NLP). Several studies have proposed a span-based ERE framework, which utilizes simple span embeddings for entity and relation classification. This framework addresses the issues of overlap and error propagation that were present in previous entity–relation extraction models. However, span-based models overlook the influence of lexical information on the semantic representation of the span and fail to consider relations with a strong intrinsic connection between span pairs. To tackle these aforementioned issues, we present a new ERE model called ER-LAC (Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction Model with Multi-level Lexical and Attention on Context Features). This model is designed with multi-granularity lexical features to enhance the semantic representation of spans, and a transformer classifier is employed to capture the internal connections between span pairs, thereby improving the performance of relational classification. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, ablation experiments were conducted on the CoNLL04 dataset. The proposed model was also compared with other models on three datasets, showcasing its computational efficiency. The results indicate that the introduced lexical features and classifier enhance the F1 score for entity extraction by 0.84% to 2.04% and improve the F1 score for relationship classification by 0.96% to 2.26% when compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) model and the baseline SpERT model, respectively.