Graph Based Semi-Supervised Approach for Information Extraction

Classification techniques deploy supervised labeled instances to train classifiers for various classification problems. However labeled instances are limited, expensive, and time consuming to obtain, due to the need of experienced human annotators. Meanwhile large amount of unlabeled data is usually easy to obtain. Semi-supervised learning addresses the problem of utilizing unlabeled data along with supervised labeled data, to build better classifiers. In this paper we introduce a semi-supervised approach based on mutual reinforcement in graphs to obtain more labeled data to enhance the classifier accuracy. The approach has been used to supplement a maximum entropy model for semi-supervised training of the ACE Relation Detection and Characterization (RDC) task. ACE RDC is considered a hard task in information extraction due to lack of large amounts of training data and inconsistencies in the available data. The proposed approach provides 10% relative improvement over the state of the art supervised baseline system.