Exploring Privileged Features for Relation Extraction With Contrastive Student-Teacher Learning

Significant progress has been made by joint entity and relation extraction methods, which directly generate the relation triplets and mitigate the issue of overlapping relations. However, previous models generate the entity-relation triplets solely from input sentences. Such information is insufficient to support the modeling of interactive information between entities and relations. In this paper, we define the features that provide mutual supports for entity and relation detection but can only be accessed at training time as privileged features for relation extraction, and devise two teacher models to exploit privileged entity and relation features, respectively. Meanwhile, we propose a novel contrastive student-teacher learning framework for joint extraction of entities and relations (STER), where a student network is encouraged to amalgamate privileged knowledge from two expert teacher networks that additionally utilize the privileged features, based on contrastive learning. Experiment results on three benchmark datasets (i.e., ADE, SciERC and CoNLL04) demonstrate that STER has robust superiority over competitors and sets state-of-the-art. For reproducibility, we release the data and source code at: https://github.com/siat-nlp/STER.