Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction

Xilai Ma, Jing Li, Min Zhang


Abstract
Few-shot relation extraction involves identifying the type of relationship between two specific entities within a text, using a limited number of annotated samples. A variety of solutions to this problem have emerged by applying meta-learning and neural graph techniques which typically necessitate a training process for adaptation. Recently, the strategy of in-context learning has been demonstrating notable results without the need of training. Few studies have already utilized in-context learning for zero-shot information extraction. Unfortunately, the evidence for inference is either not considered or implicitly modeled during the construction of chain-of-thought prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for few-shot relation extraction using large language models, named CoT-ER, chain-of-thought with explicit evidence reasoning. In particular, CoT-ER first induces large language models to generate evidences using task-specific and concept-level knowledge. Then these evidences are explicitly incorporated into chain-of-thought prompting for relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that our CoT-ER approach (with 0% training data) achieves competitive performance compared to the fully-supervised (with 100% training data) state-of-the-art approach on the FewRel1.0 and FewRel2.0 datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.153
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2334–2352
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.153
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.153
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xilai Ma, Jing Li, and Min Zhang. 2023. Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2334–2352, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction (Ma et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.153.pdf