Classifying Relation via Piecewise Convolutional Neural Networks with Transfer Learning

Relation classification is an important semantic processing task in natural language processing (NLP). Traditional works on relation classification are primarily based on supervised methods and distant supervision which rely on the large number of labels. However, these existing methods inevitably suffer from wrong labeling problem and may not perform well in resource-poor domains. We thus utilize transfer learning methods on relation classification to enable relation classification system to adapt resource-poor domains along with different relation type. In this paper, we exploit a convolutional neural network to extract lexical and syntactic features and apply transfer learning approaches for transferring the parameters of convolutional layer pre-training on general-domain corpus. The experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach is effective and outperforms several competitive baseline methods.