Boosting Document-Level Relation Extraction by Mining and Injecting Logical Rules

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims at extracting relations of all entity pairs in a document. A key challenge to DocRE lies in the complex interdependency between the relations of entity pairs. Unlike most prior efforts focusing on implicitly powerful representations, the recently proposed LogiRE (Ru et al., 2021) explicitly captures the interdependency by learning logical rules. However, LogiRE requires extra parameterized modules to reason merely after training backbones, and this disjointed optimization of backbones and extra modules may lead to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose MILR, a logic enhanced framework that boosts DocRE by Mining and Injecting Logical Rules. MILR first mines logical rules from annotations based on frequencies. Then in training, consistency regularization is leveraged as an auxiliary loss to penalize instances that violate mined rules. Finally, MILR infers from a global perspective based on integer programming. Compared with LogiRE, MILR does not introduce extra parameters and injects logical rules during both training and inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that MILR not only improves the relation extraction performance (1.1%-3.8% F1) but also makes predictions more logically consistent (over 4.5% Logic). More importantly, MILR also consistently outperforms LogiRE on both counts. Code is available at https://github.com/XingYing-stack/MILR.