Using corpus statistics on entities to improve semi-supervised relation extraction from the Web

Many errors produced by unsupervised and semi-supervised relation extraction (RE) systems occur because of wrong recognition of entities that participate in the relations. This is especially true for systems that do not use separate named-entity recognition components, instead relying on general-purpose shallow parsing. Such systems have greater applicability, because they are able to extract relations that contain attributes of unknown types. However, this generality comes with the cost in accuracy. In this paper we show how to use corpus statistics to validate and correct the arguments of extracted relation instances, improving the overall RE performance. We test the methods on SRES - a self-supervised Web relation extraction system. We also compare the performance of corpus-based methods to the performance of validation and correction methods based on supervised NER components.