CLEAR: Cross-Document Link-Enhanced Attention for Relation Extraction with Relation-Aware Context Filtering

Abstract

Cross-document relation extraction (CodRE) aims to predict the semantic relationships between target entities located in different documents, a critical capability for comprehensive knowledge graph construction and multi-source intelligence analysis. Existing approaches primarily rely on bridge entities to capture interdependencies between target entities across documents. However, these models face two potential limitations: they employ entity-centered context filters that overlook relation-specific information, and they fail to account for varying semantic distances between document paths. To address these challenges, we propose CLEAR (Cross-document Link-Enhanced Attention for Relations), a novel framework integrating three key components: (1) the Relation-aware Context Filter that incorporates relation type descriptions to preserve critical relation-specific evidence; (2) the Path Distance-Weighted Attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention weights based on semantic distances between document paths; and (3) a cross-path entity matrix that leverages inner- and inter-path relations to enrich target entity representations. Experimental results on the CodRED benchmark demonstrate that CLEAR outperforms all competitive baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance, with 68.78% AUC and 68.42% F1 scores, confirming the effectiveness of our framework.