Position-aware Attention and Supervised Data Improve Slot Filling

Yuhao Zhang, Victor Zhong, Danqi Chen,Gabor Angeli, Christopher D. Manning

Stanford UniversityStanford, CA 94305

{yuhao, vzhong, danqi}@cs.stanford.edu{angeli, manning}@cs.stanford.edu

Abstract

Organized relational knowledge in theform of “knowledge graphs” is importantfor many applications. However, the abil-ity to populate knowledge bases with factsautomatically extracted from documentshas improved frustratingly slowly. Thispaper simultaneously addresses two issuesthat have held back prior work. We firstpropose an effective new model, whichcombines an LSTM sequence model witha form of entity position-aware attentionthat is better suited to relation extraction.Then we build TACRED, a large (119,474examples) supervised relation extractiondataset, obtained via crowdsourcing andtargeted towards TAC KBP relations. Thecombination of better supervised data anda more appropriate high-capacity modelenables much better relation extractionperformance. When the model trained onthis new dataset replaces the previous rela-tion extraction component of the best TACKBP 2015 slot filling system, its F1 scoreincreases markedly from 22.2% to 26.7%.

1 Introduction

A basic but highly important challenge in natu-ral language understanding is being able to pop-ulate a knowledge base with relational facts con-tained in a piece of text. For the text shown in Fig-ure 1, the system should extract triples, or equiv-alently, knowledge graph edges, such as 〈Penner,per:spouse, Lisa Dillman〉. Combining such ex-tractions, a system can produce a knowledge graphof relational facts between persons, organizations,and locations in the text. This task involves en-tity recognition, mention coreference and/or entitylinking, and relation extraction; we focus on the

Penner is survived by his brother, John, acopy editor at the Times, and his former wife,Times sportswriter Lisa Dillman.

Subject Relation ObjectMike Penner per:spouse Lisa DillmanMike Penner per:siblings John PennerLisa Dillman per:title SportswriterLisa Dillman per:employee of Los Angeles TimesJohn Penner per:title Copy EditorJohn Penner per:employee of Los Angeles Times

Figure 1: An example of relation extraction fromthe TAC KBP corpus.

most challenging “slot filling” task of filling in therelations between entities in the text.

Organized relational knowledge in the formof “knowledge graphs” has become an importantknowledge resource. These graphs are now exten-sively used by search engine companies, both toprovide information to end-users and internally tothe system, as a way to understand relationships.However, up until now, automatic knowledge ex-traction has proven sufficiently difficult that mostof the facts in these knowledge graphs have beenbuilt up by hand. It is therefore a key challengeto show that NLP technology can effectively con-tribute to this important problem.

Existing work on relation extraction (e.g., Ze-lenko et al., 2003; Mintz et al., 2009; Adel et al.,2016) has been unable to achieve sufficient re-call or precision for the results to be usable ver-sus hand-constructed knowledge bases. Super-vised training data has been scarce and, whiletechniques like distant supervision appear to be apromising way to extend knowledge bases at lowcost, in practice the training data has often beentoo noisy for reliable training of relation extrac-tion systems (Angeli et al., 2015). As a resultmost systems fail to make correct extractions evenin apparently straightforward cases like Figure 1,

Example Entity Types & Label

Carey will succeed Cathleen P. Black, who held the position for 15 years and will take on a newrole as chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, the company said.

Types: PERSON/TITLERelation: per:title

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, who was born and reared in Baltimore, lived on Long Island and ran achild-care center in Queens with her second husband, Stanley Kirkaldy.

Types: PERSON/CITYRelation: per:city of birth

Pandit worked at the brokerage Morgan Stanley for about 11 years until 2005, when he and someMorgan Stanley colleagues quit and later founded the hedge fund Old Lane Partners.

Types: ORGANIZATION/PERSONRelation: org:founded by

Baldwin declined further comment, and said JetBlue chief executive Dave Barger was unavailable. Types: PERSON/TITLERelation: no relation

Table 1: Sampled examples from the TACRED dataset. Subject entities are highlighted in blue andobject entities are highlighted in red.

where the best system at the NIST TAC Knowl-edge Base Population (TAC KBP) 2015 evaluationfailed to recognize the relation between Pennerand Dillman.1 Consequently most automatic sys-tems continue to make heavy use of hand-writtenrules or patterns because it has been hard for ma-chine learning systems to achieve adequate pre-cision or to generalize as well across text types.We believe machine learning approaches have suf-fered from two key problems: (1) the models usedhave been insufficiently tailored to relation extrac-tion, and (2) there has been insufficient annotateddata available to satisfy the training of data-hungrymodels, such as deep learning models.

This work addresses both of these problems.We propose a new, effective neural network se-quence model for relation classification. Its ar-chitecture is better customized for the slot fill-ing task: the word representations are augmentedby extra distributed representations of word posi-tion relative to the subject and object of the puta-tive relation. This means that the neural attentionmodel can effectively exploit the combination ofsemantic similarity-based attention and position-based attention. Secondly, we markedly improvethe availability of supervised training data by us-ing Mechanical Turk crowd annotation to pro-duce a large supervised training dataset (Table 1),suitable for the common relations between peo-ple, organizations and locations which are used inthe TAC KBP evaluations. We name this datasetthe TAC Relation Extraction Dataset (TACRED),and will make it available through the LinguisticData Consortium (LDC) in order to respect copy-rights on the underlying text.

Combining these two gives a system withmarkedly better slot filling performance. This is

1Note: former spouses count as spouses in the ontology.

shown not only for a relation classification task onthe crowd-annotated data but also for the incorpo-ration of the resulting classifiers into a completecold start knowledge base population system. OnTACRED, our system achieves a relation classi-fication F1 score that is 7.9% higher than that ofa strong feature-based classifier, and 3.5% higherthan that of the best previous neural architecturethat we re-implemented. When this model is usedin concert with a pattern-based system on the TACKBP 2015 Cold Start Slot Filling evaluation data,the system achieves an F1 score of 26.7%, whichexceeds the previous state-of-the-art by 4.5% ab-solute. While this performance certainly does notsolve the knowledge base population problem –achieving sufficient recall remains a formidablechallenge – this is nevertheless notable progress.

2 A Position-aware Neural SequenceModel Suitable for Relation Extraction

Existing work on neural relation extraction (e.g.,Zeng et al., 2014; Nguyen and Grishman, 2015;Zhou et al., 2016) has focused on convolutionalneural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural net-works (RNNs), or their combination. While thesemodels generally work well on the datasets theyare tested on, as we will show, they often fail togeneralize to the longer sentences that are com-mon in real-world text (such as in TAC KBP).

We believe that existing model architecturessuffer from two problems: (1) Although modernsequence models such as Long Short-Term Mem-ory (LSTM) networks have gating mechanisms tocontrol the relative influence of each individualword to the final sentence representation (Hochre-iter and Schmidhuber, 1997), these controls arenot explicitly conditioned on the entire sentencebeing classified; (2) Most existing work either

h1

ps1

po1

h2

ps2

po2

hn

psn

pon

q

z

…

ana2a1

x1 x2 xn

Mike and Lisa

0

-2

1

-1

h3

x3

ps3

po3

2

0

married…

4

2

a3

(subject) (object)

Figure 2: Our proposed position-aware neural se-quence model. The model is shown with an exam-ple sentence Mike and Lisa got married.

does not explicitly model the positions of entities(i.e., subject and object) in the sequence, or mod-els the positions only within a local region.

Here, we propose a new neural sequence modelwith a position-aware attention mechanism overan LSTM network to tackle these challenges. Thismodel can (1) evaluate the relative contribution ofeach word after seeing the entire sequence, and (2)base this evaluation not only on the semantic in-formation of the sequence, but also on the globalpositions of the entities within the sequence.

We formalize the relation extraction task as fol-lows: Let X = [x1, ..., xn] denote a sentence,where xi is the i-th token. A subject entity sand an object entity o are identified in the sen-tence, corresponding to two non-overlapping con-secutive spans: Xs = [xs1 , xs1+1, . . . , xs2 ] andXo = [xo1 , xo1+1, . . . , xo2 ]. Given the sentenceX and the positions of s and o, the goal is to pre-dict a relation r ∈ R (R is the set of relations) thatholds between s and o or no relation otherwise.

Inspired by the position encoding vectors usedin Collobert et al. (2011) and Zeng et al. (2014),we define a position sequence relative to the sub-ject entity [ps1, ..., p

sn], where

psi =

i− s1, i < s1

0, s1 ≤ i ≤ s2

i− s2, i > s2

(1)

Here s1, s2 are the starting and ending indices ofthe subject entity respectively, and psi ∈ Z can beviewed as the relative distance of token xi to thesubject entity. Similarly, we obtain a position se-quence [po1, ..., p

on] relative to the object entities.

Let x = [x1, ...,xn] be word embeddings of thesentence, obtained using an embedding matrix E.Similarly, we obtain position embedding vectorsps = [ps

1, ...,psn] and po = [po

1, ...,pon] using a

shared position embedding matrix P respectively.Next, as shown in Figure 2, we obtain hidden staterepresentations of the sentence by feeding x intoan LSTM:

{h1, ...,hn} = LSTM({x1, ...,xn}) (2)

We define a summary vector q = hn (i.e., the out-put state of the LSTM). This summary vector en-codes information about the entire sentence. Thenfor each hidden state hi, we calculate an attentionweight ai as:

ui = v> tanh(Whhi +Wqq+

Wspsi +Wop

oi ) (3)

ai =exp(ui)∑nj=1 exp(uj)

(4)

Here Wh,Wq ∈ Rda×d, Ws,Wo ∈ Rda×dp

and v ∈ Rda are learnable parameters of the net-work, where d is the dimension of hidden states,dp is the dimension of position embeddings, andda is the size of attention layer. Additional param-eters of the network include embedding matricesE ∈ R|V|×d and P ∈ R(2L−1)×dp , where V is thevocabulary and L is the maximum sentence length.

We regard attention weight ai as the relativecontribution of the specific word to the sentencerepresentation. The final sentence representationz is computed as:

z =∑n

i=1aihi (5)

z is later fed into a fully-connected layer followedby a softmax layer for relation classification.

Note that our model significantly differs fromthe attention mechanism in Bahdanau et al. (2015)and Zhou et al. (2016) in our use of the summaryvector and position embeddings, and the way ourattention weights are computed. An intuitive wayto understand the model is to view the attentioncalculation as a selection process, where the goalis to select relevant contexts over irrelevant ones.

Dataset # Rel. # Ex. % Neg.

SemEval-2010 Task 8 19 10,717 17.4%ACE 2003–2004 24 16,771 N/ATACRED 42 119,474 78.7%

Table 2: A comparison of existing datasets and ourproposed TACRED dataset. % Neg. denotes thepercentage of negative examples (no relation).

Here the summary vector (q) helps the model tobase this selection on the semantic informationof the entire sentence (rather than on each wordonly), while the position vectors (ps

i and poi ) pro-

vides important spatial information between eachword and the entities.

3 The TAC Relation Extraction Dataset

Previous research has shown that slot filling sys-tems can greatly benefit from supervised data.For example, Angeli et al. (2014b) showed thateven a small amount of supervised data can boostthe end-to-end F1 score by 3.9% on the TACKBP tasks. However, existing relation extrac-tion datasets such as the SemEval-2010 Task 8dataset (Hendrickx et al., 2009) and the AutomaticContent Extraction (ACE) (Strassel et al., 2008)dataset are less useful for this purpose. This ismainly because: (1) these datasets are relativelysmall for effectively training high-capacity mod-els (see Table 2), and (2) they capture very differ-ent types of relations. For example, the SemEvaldataset focuses on semantic relations (e.g., Cause-Effect, Component-Whole) between two nominals.

One can further argue that it is easy to obtain alarge amount of training data using distant super-vision (Mintz et al., 2009). In practice, however,due to the large amount of noise in the induceddata, training relation extractors that perform wellbecomes very difficult. For example, Riedel et al.(2010) show that up to 31% of the distantly super-vised labels are wrong when creating training datafrom aligning Freebase to newswire text.

To tackle these challenges, we collect a largesupervised dataset TACRED, targeted towards theTAC KBP relations.

Data collection. We create TACRED based onquery entities and annotated system responses inthe yearly TAC KBP evaluations. In each year ofthe TAC KBP evaluation (2009–2015), 100 enti-ties (people or organizations) are given as queries,

Data Split # Ex. Years

Train 75,050 2009–2012Dev 25,764 2013Test 18,660 2014

Table 3: Statistics on TACRED: number of exam-ples and the source of each portion.

for which participating systems should find asso-ciated relations and object entities. We make useof Mechanical Turk to annotate each sentence inthe source corpus that contains one of these queryentities. For each sentence, we ask crowd workersto annotate both the subject and object entity spansand the relation types.

Dataset stratification. In total we collect119,474 examples. We stratify TACRED acrossyears in which the TAC KBP challenge was run,and use examples corresponding to query entitiesfrom 2009 to 2012 as training split, 2013 asdevelopment split, and 2014 as test split. Wereserve the TAC KBP 2015 evaluation data forrunning slot filling evaluations, as presented inSection 4. Detailed statistics are given in Table 3.

Discussion. Table 1 presents sampled examplesfrom TACRED. Compared to existing datasets,TACRED has four advantages. First, it containsan order of magnitude more relation instances (Ta-ble 2), enabling the training of expressive mod-els. Second, we reuse the entity and relation typesof the TAC KBP tasks. We believe these relationtypes are of more interest to downstream appli-cations. Third, we fully annotate all negative in-stances that appear in our data collection process,to ensure that models trained on TACRED are notbiased towards predicting false positives on real-world text. Lastly, the average sentence length inTACRED is 36.2, compared to 19.1 in the Sem-Eval dataset, reflecting the complexity of contextsin which relations occur in real-world text.

Due to space constraints, we describe the datacollection and validation process, system inter-faces, and more statistics and examples of TAC-RED in the supplementary material. We willmake TACRED publicly available through theLDC.

4 Experiments

In this section we evaluate the effectiveness of ourproposed model and TACRED on improving slot

filling systems. Specifically, we run two sets of ex-periments: (1) we evaluate model performance onthe relation extraction task using TACRED, and(2) we evaluate model performance on the TACKBP 2015 cold start slot filling task, by trainingthe models on TACRED.

4.1 Baseline Models

We compare our model against the following base-line models for relation extraction and slot filling:

TAC KBP 2015 winning system. To judge ourproposed model against a strong baseline, wecompare against Stanford’s top performing systemon the TAC KBP 2015 cold start slot filling task(Angeli et al., 2015). At the core of this systemare two relation extractors: a pattern-based extrac-tor and a logistic regression (LR) classifier. Thepattern-based system uses a total of 4,528 surfacepatterns and 169 dependency patterns. The logis-tic regression model was trained on approximately2 million bootstrapped examples (using a smallannotated dataset and high-precision pattern sys-tem output) that are carefully tuned for TAC KBPslot filling evaluation. It uses a comprehensive fea-ture set similar to the MIML-RE system for re-lation extraction (Surdeanu et al., 2012), includ-ing lemmatized n-grams, sequence NER tags andPOS tags, positions of entities, and various fea-tures over dependency paths, etc.

Convolutional neural networks. We follow the1-dimensional CNN architecture by Nguyen andGrishman (2015) for relation extraction. Thismodel learns a representation of the input sen-tence, by first running a series of convolutional op-erations on the sentence with various filters, andthen feeding the output into a max-pooling layerto reduce the dimension. The resulting represen-tation is then fed into a fully-connected layer fol-lowed by a softmax layer for relation classifica-tion. As an extension, positional embeddings arealso introduced into this model to better capturethe relative position of each word to the subjectand object entities and were shown to achieve im-proved results. We use “CNN-PE” to represent theCNN model with positional embeddings.

Dependency-based recurrent neural networks.In dependency-based neural models, shortest de-pendency paths between entities are often used asinput to the neural networks. The intuition is toeliminate tokens that are potentially less relevant

to the classification of the relation. For the ex-ample in Figure 1, the shortest dependency pathbetween the two entities is:

[Penner]← survived→ brother

→ wife→ [Lisa Dillman]

We follow the SDP-LSTM model proposed by Xuet al. (2015b). In this model, each shortest depen-dency path is divided into two separate sub-pathsfrom the subject entity and the object entity to thelowest common ancestor node. Each sub-path isfed into an LSTM network, and the resulting hid-den units at each word position are passed into amax-over-time pooling layer to form the output ofthis sub-path. Outputs from the two sub-paths arethen concatenated to form the final representation.

In addition to the above models, we also com-pare our proposed model against an LSTM se-quence model without attention mechanism.

4.2 Implementation Details

We map words that occur less than 2 times in thetraining set to a special <UNK> token. We usethe pre-trained GloVe vectors (Pennington et al.,2014) to initialize word embeddings. For all theLSTM layers, we find that 2-layer stacked LSTMsgenerally work better than one-layer LSTMs. Weminimize cross-entropy loss over all 42 relationsusing AdaGrad (Duchi et al., 2011). We applyDropout with p = 0.5 to CNNs and LSTMs. Dur-ing training we also find a word dropout strategyto be very effective: we randomly set a token to be<UNK> with a probability p. We set p to be 0.06for the SDP-LSTM model and 0.04 for all othermodels.

Entity masking. We replace each subject entityin the original sentence with a special <NER>-SUBJ token where <NER> is the correspondingNER signature of the subject as provided in TAC-RED. We do the same processing for object en-tities. This processing step helps (1) provide amodel with entity type information, and (2) pre-vent a model from overfitting its predictions tospecific entities.

Multi-channel augmentation. Instead of usingonly word vectors as input to the network, weaugment the input with part-of-speech (POS) andnamed entity recognition (NER) embeddings. Werun Stanford CoreNLP (Manning et al., 2014) toobtain the POS and NER annotations.

Model P R F1

Traditional Patterns 85.3 23.4 36.8LR 72.0 47.8 57.5LR + Patterns 71.4 50.1 58.9

Neural CNN 72.1 50.3 59.2CNN-PE 68.2 55.4 61.1SDP-LSTM 62.0 54.8 58.2LSTM 61.4 61.7 61.5Our model 67.7 63.2 65.4

Ensemble 69.4 64.8 67.0

Table 4: Model performance on the test set ofTACRED, micro-averaged over instances. LR =Logistic Regression.

We describe our model hyperparameters andtraining in detail in the supplementary material.

4.3 Evaluation on TACRED

We first evaluate all models on TACRED. Wetrain each model for 5 separate runs with inde-pendent random initializations. For each run weperform early stopping using the dev set. We thenselect the run (among 5) that achieves the medianF1 score on the dev set, and report its test set per-formance.

Table 4 summarizes our results. We observe thatall neural models achieve higher F1 scores thanthe logistic regression and patterns systems, whichdemonstrates the effectiveness of neural modelsfor relation extraction. Although positional em-beddings help increase the F1 by around 2% overthe plain CNN model, a simple (2-layer) LSTMmodel performs surprisingly better than CNN anddependency-based models. Lastly, our proposedposition-aware mechanism is very effective andachieves an F1 score of 65.4%, with an absolute in-crease of 3.9% over the best baseline neural model(LSTM) and 7.9% over the baseline logistic re-gression system. We also run an ensemble of ourposition-aware attention model which takes major-ity votes from 5 runs with random initializationsand it further pushes the F1 score up by 1.6%.

We find that different neural architectures showa different balance between precision and recall.CNN-based models tend to have higher precision;RNN-based models have better recall. This canbe explained by noting that the filters in CNNs areessentially a form of “fuzzy n-gram patterns”.

query entity:

hop-0 slot:

hop-1 slot:

Mike Penner

per:spouse

per:title

Lisa Dillman

Sportswriter

(query) (fillers)

Figure 3: An example query and correspondingfillers in the TAC KBP cold start slot filling task.

4.4 Evaluation on TAC KBP Slot FillingSecond, we evaluate the slot filling performanceof all models using the TAC KBP 2015 cold startslot filling task (Ellis et al., 2015). In this task,about 50k newswire and Web forum documentsare selected as the evaluation corpus. A slot fillingsystem is asked to answer a series of queries withtwo-hop slots (Figure 3): The first slot asks aboutfillers of a relation with the query entity as the sub-ject (Mike Penner), and we term this a hop-0 slot;the second slot asks about fillers with the system’shop-0 output as the subject, and we term this ahop-1 slot. System predictions are then evaluatedagainst gold annotations, and micro-averaged pre-cision, recall and F1 scores are calculated at thehop-0 and hop-1 levels. Lastly hop-all scores arecalculated by combining hop-0 and hop-1 scores.2

Evaluating relation extraction systems on slotfilling is particularly challenging in that: (1) End-to-end cold start slot filling scores conflate the per-formance of all modules in the system (i.e., en-tity recognizer, entity linker and relation extrac-tor). (2) Errors in hop-0 predictions can easilypropagate to hop-1 predictions. To fairly evalu-ate each relation extraction model on this task, weuse Stanford’s 2015 slot filling system as our basicpipeline.3 It is a very strong baseline specificallytuned for TAC KBP evaluation and ranked top inthe 2015 evaluation. We then plug in the corre-sponding relation extractor trained on TACRED,keeping all other modules unchanged.

Table 5 presents our results. We find that:(1) by only training our logistic regression modelon TACRED (in contrast to on the 2 million boot-strapped examples used in the 2015 Stanford sys-tem) and combining it with patterns, we obtain ahigher hop-0 F1 score than the 2015 Stanford sys-

2In the TAC KBP cold start slot filling evaluation, a hop-1slot is transferred to a pseudo-slot which is treated equally asa hop-0 slot. Hop-all precision, recall and F1 are then calcu-lated by combining these pseudo-slot predictions and hop-0predictions.

3This system uses the fine-grained NER system in Stan-ford CoreNLP (Manning et al., 2014) for entity detection andthe Illinois Wikifier (Ratinov et al., 2011) for entity linking.

Hop-0 Hop-1 Hop-allModel P R F1 P R F1 P R F1

Patterns 63.8 17.7 27.7 49.3 8.6 14.7 58.9 13.3 21.8LR 36.6 21.9 27.4 15.1 10.1 12.2 25.6 16.3 19.9+ Patterns (2015 winning system) 37.5 24.5 29.7 16.5 12.8 14.4 26.6 19.0 22.2

LR trained on TACRED 32.7 20.6 25.3 7.9 9.5 8.6 16.8 15.3 16.0+ Patterns 36.5 26.5 30.7 11.0 15.3 12.8 20.1 21.2 20.6

Our model 39.0 28.9 33.2 17.7 13.9 15.6 28.2 21.5 24.4+ Patterns 40.2 31.5 35.3 19.4 16.5 17.8 29.7 24.2 26.7

Table 5: Model performance on TAC KBP 2015 slot filling evaluation, micro-averaged over queries.Hop-0 scores are calculated on the simple single-hop slot filling results; hop-1 scores are calculatedon slot filling results chained on systems’ hop-0 predictions; hop-all scores are calculated based on thecombination of the two. LR = logistic regression.

Model Dev F1

Final Model 66.22– Position-aware attention 65.12– Attention 64.71– Pre-trained embeddings 65.34– Word dropout 65.69– All above 63.60

Table 6: An ablation test of our position-awareattention model, evaluated on TACRED dev set.Scores are median of 5 models.

tem, and a similar hop-all F1; (2) our proposedposition-aware attention model substantially out-performs the 2015 Stanford system on all hop-0,hop-1 and hop-all F1 scores. Combining it withthe patterns, we achieve a hop-all F1 of 26.7%, anabsolute improvement of 4.5% over the previousstate-of-the-art result.

4.5 Analysis

Model ablation. Table 6 presents the resultsof an ablation test of our position-aware atten-tion model on the development set of TACRED.The entire attention mechanism contributes about1.5% F1, where the position-aware term in Eq. (3)alone contributes about 1% F1 score.

Impact of negative examples. Figure 4 showshow the slot filling evaluation scores change as wechange the amount of negative (i.e., no relation)training data provided to our proposed model. Wefind that: (1) At hop-0 level, precision increases aswe provide more negative examples, while recallstays almost unchanged. F1 score keeps increas-ing. (2) At hop-all level, F1 score increases by

20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1005

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

Negative Examples Sample Rate (%)

Scor

eson

KB

PSl

otFi

lling

Task

(%)

hop-0 prec. hop-0 rec.hop-0 F1 hop-all F1

Figure 4: Change of slot filling hop-0 and hop-all scores as number of negative training exampleschanges. 100% is with all the negative examplesincluded in the training set; the left side scoreshave positives and negatives roughly balanced.

about 10% as we change the amount of negativeexamples from 20% to 100%.

Performance by sentence length. Figure 5shows performance on varying sentence lengths.We find that: (1) Performance of all models de-grades substantially as the sentences get longer.(2) Compared to the baseline Logistic Regressionmodel, all neural models handle long sentencesbetter. (3) Compared to CNN-PE model, RNN-based models are more robust on long sentences,and notably SDP-LSTM model is least sensitive tosentence length. (4) Our proposed model achievesequal or better results on sentences of all lengths,except for sentences with more than 60 tokenswhere SDP-LSTM model achieves the best result.

10 20 30 40 50 60 >6040

45

50

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

90

95

Sentence Length

F 1sc

ores

(%)

LRCNN-PESDP-LSTMLSTMOur model

Figure 5: TACRED development set F1 scores forsentences of varying lengths.

Improvement by slot types. We calculate theF1 score for each slot type and compare theimprovement from using our proposed modelacross slot types. When compared with theCNN-PE model, our position-aware attentionmodel achieves improved F1 scores on 30out of the 41 slot types, with the top 5 slottypes being org:members, per:country of death,org:shareholders, per:children and per:religion.When compared with SDP-LSTM model, ourmodel achieves improved F1 scores on 26out of the 41 slot types, with the top 5 slottypes being org:political/religious affiliation,per:country of death, org:alternate names,per:religion and per:alternate names. We ob-serve that slot types with relatively sparse trainingexamples tend to be improved by using theposition-aware attention model.

Attention visualization. Lastly, Figure 6 showsthe visualization of attention weights assigned byour model on sampled sentences from the devel-opment set. We find that the model learns to paymore attention to words that are informative forthe relation (e.g., “graduated from”, “niece” and“chairman”), though it still makes mistakes (e.g.,“refused to name the three”). We also observe thatthe model tends to put a lot of weight onto objectentities, as the object NER signatures are very in-formative to the classification of relations.

5 Related Work

Relation extraction. There are broadly threemain lines of work on relation extraction: first,fully-supervised approaches (Zelenko et al., 2003;Bunescu and Mooney, 2005), where a statisti-

cal classifier is trained on an annotated dataset;second, distant supervision (Mintz et al., 2009;Surdeanu et al., 2012), where a training set isformed by projecting the relations in an existingknowledge base onto textual instances that containthe entities that the relation connects; and third,Open IE (Fader et al., 2011; Mausam et al., 2012),which views its goal as producing subject-relation-object triples and expressing the relation in text.

Slot filling and knowledge base population.The most widely-known effort to evaluate slot fill-ing and KBP systems is the yearly TAC KBP slotfilling tasks, starting from 2009 (McNamee andDang, 2009). Participants in slot filling tasks usu-ally make use of hybrid systems that combine pat-terns, Open IE, distant supervision and supervisedsystems for relation extraction (Kisiel et al., 2015;Finin et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016).

Datasets for relation extraction. Populargeneral-domain datasets include the ACE dataset(Strassel et al., 2008) and the SemEval-2010 task8 dataset (Hendrickx et al., 2009). In addition,the BioNLP Shared Tasks (Kim et al., 2009) areyearly efforts on creating datasets and evaluationsfor biomedical information extraction systems.

Deep learning models for relation extraction.Many deep learning models have been proposedfor relation extraction, with a focus on end-to-endtraining using CNNs (Zeng et al., 2014; Nguyenand Grishman, 2015) and RNNs (Zhang et al.,2015). Other popular approaches include usingCNN or RNN over dependency paths between en-tities (Xu et al., 2015a,b), augmenting RNNs withdifferent components (Xu et al., 2016; Zhou et al.,2016), and combining RNNs and CNNs (Vu et al.,2016; Wang et al., 2016). Adel et al. (2016) com-pares the performance of CNN models against tra-ditional approaches on slot filling using a portionof the TAC KBP evaluation data.

6 Conclusion

We introduce a state-of-the-art position-awareneural sequence model for relation extraction, aswell as TACRED, a large-scale, crowd-sourceddataset that is orders of magnitude larger than pre-vious relation extraction datasets. Our proposedmodel outperforms a strong feature-based classi-fier and all baseline neural models. In combinationwith the new dataset, it improves the state-of-the-

Sampled Sentences Predicted Labels

PER-SUBJ graduated from North Korea ’s elite Kim Il Sung University and

ORG-OBJ ORG-OBJ .

per:schools attended

The cause was a heart attack following a case of pneumonia , said

PER-SUBJ ’s niece , PER-OBJ PER-OBJ .

per:other family

Independent ORG-SUBJ ORG-SUBJ ORG-SUBJ ( ECC ) chairman PER-OBJ

PER-OBJ refused to name the three , saying they would be identified when

the final list of candidates for the august 20 polls is published on Friday .

org:top members/employees

Figure 6: Sampled sentences from the TACRED development set, with words highlighted according tothe attention weights produced by our best model.

art hop-all F1 on the TAC KBP 2015 slot fillingtask by 4.5% absolute.

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their help-ful suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge thesupport of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelli-gence and the support of the Defense AdvancedResearch Projects Agency (DARPA) Deep Ex-ploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) Programunder Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)contract No. FA8750-13-2-0040. Any opinions,findings, and conclusion or recommendations ex-pressed in this material are those of the authors anddo not necessarily reflect the view of the DARPA,AFRL, or the US government.

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A TACRED Data Collection andValidation

In this appendix, we describe the way we collectand validate TACRED in full detail.

A.1 Data Collection

TACRED leverages the work done selectingquery entities and annotating system responses inthe TAC KBP evaluations. In each year of theTAC KBP evaluation (2009–2015), 100 query en-tities are given to participating KBP systems withthe aim of filling in valid knowledge base entriesfor these entities. Our annotation effort re-usesthese query entities, annotating each sentence inthe source corpus that contains one of these enti-ties. Given the set of mention pairs (e.g., Pennerand Lisa Dillman) containing an evaluation entity,the mention pair can have either 1) been extractedduring a previous KBP competition and markedcorrect by an LDC annotator, or 2) been generatedautomatically from candidate mention pairs in thecorpus. For clarity, we refer to the former as LDCexamples and the latter as generated examples,and describe them separately.

LDC examples. For examples in this category,although the relations have been annotated by anLDC annotator, the provenance for the mentionpairs provided in TAC KBP evaluation files are of-ten too general or imprecise; for example in earlyyears only the document that contains a mentionpair is given as provenance. We solve this prob-lem with a two-stage annotation task (HIT) in Me-chanical Turk: In the first task, Turk annotatorsare provided with the mention pair and its relation(annotated by LDC), and asked to find a sentencein the document that expresses the extraction. Inthe second task, annotators are asked to identifythe spans of both the subject and object entities.See Figure 7 and Figure 8 for example interfacesprovided to Turk annotators.

Generated examples. To further collect exam-ples that are not annotated by LDC, we firstrun annotations on the corpus using a combina-tion of Stanford’s statistical coreference system(Clark and Manning, 2015) and the Illinois Wik-ifier (Ratinov et al., 2011). Then we collect allmention pairs in which one mention is linked toone of the query entities by the entity linker. Toprevent the resulting dataset from being skewedtowards commonly occurring query entities such

Instructions

Please find the sentence that provides evidence the following statements.Your work will greatly contribute to a scientific research project related tothe natural language task of relation extraction(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_extraction). Thank you!

1. You will be a shown a statement as well as an article that providesevidence for the statement. Please select the sentence that providesevidence for the statement.

2. The statement describes a relationship between two phrases, wherethe phrases are usually people, places, organizations, etc. For yourconvience, we have highlighted potential references to theperson/organization in the statement. However the highlighting maynot be accurate.

3. You must select a sentence in order for your work to be accepted. Wehave placed a number of sanity check questions which are clear andhave obvious answers. If you consistently give the wrong response forsanity questions, your answers will not be accepted.

Here are some common points of confusion. If you are unclear about whatthe statement means, please refer to the full documentation by clicking here(http://www.nist.gov/tac/2015/KBP/ColdStart/guidelines/TAC_KBP_2015_Slot_Descriptions_V1.0.pdf)

If a person employed previously by an organization, the "employee of"relation still holds.The "employee of" relationship can hold between a person and astate/nation. For example, "Obama, the president of the UnitedStates" demonstrates that Obama is an employee of the UnitedStates.Actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians etc. should be consideredas employees of networks/companies/record labels that produce theirwork. For example, "Her album XYZ, produced by the record labelAwesome Records , was released last Tuesday" demonstrates thatwhoever "her" refers to is an employee of Awesome Records .

Stamford is a city

Sandra_Herold has resided in

STAMFORD , Connecticut 2009­12­07 20:51:09 UTC Cohen said that therewas no record of the animal attacking anyone previously and that it hadinteracted with Nash many times before the attack .

The chimp ripped off Nash 's hands , nose , lips and eyelids .

Connecticut State 's Attorney David Cohen said Monday that there is noevidence that Sandra Herold of Stamford was aware of risk that herchimpanzee posed to other people and disregarded it .

Nash 's family is suing Herold for $ 50 million and wants to sue the statefor $ 150 million .

The 200­pound ­LRB­ 91­kilogram ­RRB­ chimpanzee went berserk inFebruary after Herold asked Charla Nash to help lure him back into herhouse .

US chimp ' s owner won ' t be charged over attack A prosecutor says hedoes not plan to charge the owner of a chimpanzee that mauled andblinded a woman .

(Optional) Thank you for your help! Do you have any feedback for us?

Figure 7: Example of an LDC examples HIT onMechanical Turk for identifying the relevant sen-tence. The annotator is presented with every sen-tence from the document as well as the extractionfor which to find the sentence.

as “Barack Obama”, we enforce a hard upper limiton the number of collected mention pairs contain-ing a query entity. Specifically, for each queryentity q, we retrieve Nq sentences from the KBPcorpus that contain an entity mention linked toq. Then let Nqc denote the number of extrac-tions submitted by competing KBP systems thatwere also deemed correct by human annotators,we want Nq to be proportional to Nqc , and heuris-tically set: Nq = min (9 ·Nqc , 300). Next, eachmention pair, along with the corresponding sen-tence in which it occurs, is annotated for its rela-tion type (or no relation) as a task on MechanicalTurk. Figure 9 shows an example task interfacefor generated examples on Mechanical Turk.

A.2 Data Validation

In order to maintain the quality of TACRED, wevalidate the collected data both during and afterthe annotation process. We made use of crowd-sourced data from a previous annotation effort onthe same relation set (Angeli et al., 2014a). Duringannotation, 10% of the HITs presented to a workerare sanity check examples from this previous data,and annotators whose error rate on these examplesexceeds 25% were asked to have their work re-annotated.

After the data collection is done, one of the au-thors manually examined 300 sampled instances.The estimated annotation accuracy is 93.3%, witha confidence interval of (89.9%, 95.9%). In addi-tion, for the collected generated examples, we esti-mate inter-annotator agreement using 761 sampled

Instructions

Stamford is a citySandra_Herold has resided inConnecticut State 's Attorney David Cohen said Monday that there is

no evidence that Sandra Herold of Stamford was aware of risk that

her chimpanzee posed to other people and disregarded it .

Please select the first word of the phrase referring to Sandra_Herold

Your current selection:

UNSELECTED is a city UNSELECTED has resided in

Click here to reset your selection Reset

(Optional) Thank you for your help! Do you have any feedback

for us?Figure 8: Example of an LDC examples HITon Mechanical Turk for identifying the mentionspans. The annotator is presented with a sentenceobtained from the HIT shown in Figure 7 as wellas the corresponding extraction and asked to iden-tify the spans of the subject and object mentions inthe extraction.

Instructions

International Amateur Boxing Association president

Anwar Chowdhry, who is from Pakistan, defended the

decision to stop the fight.

Anwar Chowdhry is an employee or member of International

Amateur Boxing Asscociation (note: politicians are employed

by their states, musicians are employed by their record

labels)

International Amateur Boxing Asscociation is a school that

Anwar Chowdhry has attended

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

${sentence_1}

${subj_1}'s ${typechecked_rel_1} is ${obj_1}

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

${sentence_2}

${subj_2}'s ${typechecked_rel_2} is ${obj_2}

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

${sentence_3}

${subj_3}'s ${typechecked_rel_3} is ${obj_3}

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

${sentence_4}

${subj_4}'s ${typechecked_rel_4} is ${obj_4}

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

${sentence_5}

${subj_5}'s ${typechecked_rel_5} is ${obj_5}

No relation/not enough evidence

Entity is missing/sentence is invalid (happens rarely)

Figure 9: Example of a generated examples HIT.The subject entity is highlighted in blue and theobject entity is highlighted in red. The annotatoris asked to select among a set of plausible relationsthat are compatible with the subject and object en-tity types, along with an option to state that noneof the presented relations hold.

mention pairs shown to five annotators. Resultsare shown in Table 7.

A.3 Data Statistics

In total, we collect 10,691 annotations from theLDC examples task and 110,021 annotations fromthe generated examples task. After removing ex-amples where the subject and object entities over-lap, we arrive at a total of 119,474 examples.About 78.7% of all examples are annotated asno relation, which we showed to be crucial fortraining high-precision relation extraction modelsfor the TAC KBP 2015 slot filling evaluation. Fur-thermore, we find that sentences in TACRED tendto be much longer than in the SemEval dataset

Metric Score

5 annotators agree 74.2%≥ 4 annotators agree 90.5%≥ 3 annotators agree 100.0%

Fleiss Kappa 54.4%

Table 7: Estimated inter-annotator agreement us-ing 761 sampled mention pairs.

0 20 40 60 80 1000

1

2

3

4

5

6

Sentence Length

Perc

enta

geof

Dat

aset

(%) SemEval

TACRED

Figure 10: Distribution of sentence lengths inSemEval 2010 task 8 and TACRED.

(Figure 10).Table 8 presents detailed statistics on this

dataset. We also include sampled training exam-ples in Table 9.

B Model Training Details

Here we describe the way we train our models indetail for replicability.

Model hyperparameters. We use 200 for wordembedding size and 30 for every other embedding(i.e., position, POS or NER) size. For CNN mod-els, we use filter window sizes ranging from 2to 5, and 500 filters for each window size. Forthe SDP-LSTM model, in addition to POS andNER embeddings, we also include the type of de-pendency edges as an additional embedding chan-nel. For our proposed position-aware neural se-quence model, we use attention size of 200. Forall models that require LSTM layers, we find a 2-layer stacked LSTMs works better than a single-layer LSTM. We use one-directional LSTM lay-ers in all of our experiments. Empirically we findbi-directional LSTM layers give no improvementto our proposed position-aware sequence modeland marginal improvement to the simple LSTMmodel. We do not add max-pooling layers after

LSTM layers as we find this harms the perfor-mance.

Training. During training, we employ standarddropout (Srivastava et al., 2014) for CNN mod-els, and RNN dropout (Zaremba et al., 2014) forLSTM models. Additionally, for CNN models weapply `2 regularization with coefficient 10−3 toall filters to avoid overfitting. We use AdaGrad(Duchi et al., 2011) with a learning rate of 0.1 forCNN models and 1.0 for all other models. We trainCNN models for 50 epochs and other models for30 epochs, with a mini-batch size of 50. We mon-itor the training process by looking at the micro-averaged F1 score on the dev set. Starting fromthe 20th epoch, we decrease the learning rate witha decay rate of 0.9 if the dev set micro-averaged F1

score does not increase after every epoch. Finally,we evaluate the model that achieves the best devset F1 score on the test set.

Relation Total PercentageTrain

2009–2012Development

2013Test

2014

no relation 94001 78.68% 60179 19305 14517org:alternate names 1515 1.27% 893 380 242org:city of headquarters 656 0.55% 437 125 94org:country of headquarters 878 0.73% 540 215 123org:dissolved 41 0.03% 29 8 4org:founded 199 0.17% 103 49 47org:founded by 343 0.29% 145 109 89org:member of 222 0.19% 147 39 36org:members 330 0.28% 194 95 41org:number of employees/members 144 0.12% 87 35 22org:parents 528 0.44% 332 120 76org:political/religious affiliation 148 0.12% 118 13 17org:shareholders 168 0.14% 87 66 15org:stateorprovince of headquarters 407 0.34% 266 83 58org:subsidiaries 516 0.43% 326 138 52org:top members/employees 3182 2.66% 2138 635 409org:website 302 0.25% 133 133 36per:age 977 0.82% 416 292 269per:alternate names 172 0.14% 111 48 13per:cause of death 384 0.32% 127 199 58per:charges 322 0.27% 77 120 125per:children 385 0.32% 235 109 41per:cities of residence 857 0.72% 421 203 233per:city of birth 126 0.11% 77 40 9per:city of death 271 0.23% 102 133 36per:countries of residence 978 0.82% 498 281 199per:country of birth 74 0.06% 39 26 9per:country of death 83 0.07% 10 57 16per:date of birth 127 0.11% 78 39 10per:date of death 451 0.38% 151 238 62per:employee of 2621 2.19% 1837 433 351per:origin 794 0.66% 373 257 164per:other family 417 0.35% 233 96 88per:parents 334 0.28% 164 59 111per:religion 186 0.16% 61 65 60per:schools attended 277 0.23% 178 62 37per:siblings 284 0.24% 178 37 69per:spouse 569 0.48% 311 185 73per:stateorprovince of birth 88 0.07% 47 30 11per:stateorprovince of death 133 0.11% 65 53 15per:stateorprovinces of residence 560 0.47% 374 89 97per:title 4424 3.70% 2733 1065 626

Total 119474 100.00% 75050 25764 18660

Table 8: Relation distribution of the TACRED dataset.

Exa

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Tabl

e9:

Sam

pled

trai

ning

exam

ples

from

the

TAC

RE

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tase

t,w

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bjec

tent

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