Multi-hop Evidence Retrieval for Cross-document Relation Extraction

Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document.This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations,along with the challenge of multi-hop reasoning on top of entities and evidence scattered in an open set of documents.To combat these challenges, we propose Mr.Cod (Multi-hop evidence retrieval for Cross-document relation extraction), which is a multi-hop evidence retrieval method based on evidence path mining and ranking.We explore multiple variants of retrievers to show evidence retrieval is essential in cross-document RE.We also propose a contextual dense retriever for this setting.Experiments on CodRED show that evidence retrieval with Mr.Cod effectively acquires cross-document evidence and boosts end-to-end RE performance in both closed and open settings.

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 10336–10351, Toronto, Canada