Relation Extraction Using Convolution Tree Kernel Expanded with Entity Features

This paper proposes a convolution tree kernel-based approach for relation extraction where the parse tree is expanded with entity features such as entity type, subtype, and mention level etc. Our study indicates that not only can our method effectively capture both syntactic structure and entity information of relation instances, but also can avoid the difficulty with tuning the parameters in composite kernels. We also demonstrate that predicate verb information can be used to further improve the performance, though its enhancement is limited. Evaluation on the ACE2004 benchmark corpus shows that our system slightly outperforms both the previous best-reported feature-based and kernel-based systems.