Joint inference for knowledge base population

Abstract

Populating Knowledge Base (KB) with new knowledge facts from reliable text resources usually consists of linking name mentions to KB entities and identifying relationship between entity pairs. However, the task often suffers from errors propagating from upstream entity linkers to downstream relation extractors. In this paper, we propose a novel joint inference framework to allow interactions between the two subtasks and find an optimal assignment by addressing the coherence among preliminary local predictions: whether the types of entities meet the expectations of relations explicitly or implicitly, and whether the local predictions are globally compatible. We further measure the confidence of the extracted triples by looking at the details of the complete extraction process. Experiments show that the proposed framework can significantly reduce the error propagations thus obtain more reliable facts, and outperforms competitive baselines with state-of-the-art relation extraction models.