Unsupervised Relation Extraction with General Domain Knowledge

In this paper we present an unsupervised approach to relational information extraction. Our model partitions tuples representing an observed syntactic relationship between two named entities (e.g., “X was born in Y” and “X is from Y”) into clusters corresponding to underlying semantic relation types (e.g., BornIn, Located). Our approach incorporates general domain knowledge which we encode as First Order Logic rules and automatically combine with a topic model developed specifically for the relation extraction task. Evaluation results on the ACE 2007 English Relation Detection and Categorization (RDC) task show that our model outperforms competitive unsupervised approaches by a wide margin and is able to produce clusters shaped by both the data and the rules.