Entity Pair-guided Relation Summarization and Retrieval in LLMs for Document-level Relation Extraction

AbstractDocument-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entities in a document. While previous research has primarily focused on traditional small models, recent studies have extended the scope to large language models (LLMs). Current LLM-based methods typically focus on filtering all potential relations (candidate relations) within a document at one time and then performing triplet fact extraction. However, most approaches for candidate relation filtering are based on the document level, which results in insufficient correlation between candidate relations and entity pairs. In addition, the data imbalance problem caused by a large amount of no-relation data (NA problem) is another important reason for the suboptimal performance of LLM-based methods. To address these issues, we propose an entity pair-guided relation summarization and retrieval model (EP-RSR) for DocRE, which introduces an innovative LLM-based document-level relation extraction paradigm, EPRF (Entity Pair-Relation-Fact), along with an entity pair-level candidate relation filtering method. Our approach first selects entity pairs that potentially contain relations and uses them to guide relation summarization and retrieval for extracting relation facts. This enhances the relevance between candidate relations and entity pairs while alleviating the issue of imbalanced NA data. Benchmark testing on three datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for LLM-based models. Our code is available at https://github.com/LookingYu/EP-RSR.