MCVae: Margin-based conditional variational autoencoder for relation classification and pattern generation

Relation classification is a basic yet important task in natural language processing. Existing relation classification approaches mainly rely on distant supervision, which assumes that a bag of sentences mentioning a pair of entities and extracted from a given corpus should express the same relation type of this entity pair. The training of these models needs a lot of high-quality bag-level data. However, in some specific domains, such as medical domain, it is difficult to obtain sufficient and high-quality sentences in a text corpus that mention two entities with a certain medical relation between them. In such a case, it is hard for existing discriminative models to capture the representative features (i.e., common patterns) from diversely expressed entity pairs with a given relation. Thus, the classification performance cannot be guaranteed when limited features are obtained from the corpus. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose to employ a generative model, called conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), to handle the pattern sparsity. We define that each relation has an individually learned latent distribution from all possible sentences expressing this relation. As these distributions are learned based on the purpose of input reconstruction, the model's classification ability may not be strong enough and should be improved. By distinguishing the differences among different relation distributions, a margin-based regularizer is designed, which leads to a margin-based CVAE (MCVAE) that can significantly enhance the classification ability. Besides, MCVAE can automatically generate semantically meaningful patterns that describe the given relations. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed MCVAE on the tasks of relation classification and relation-specific pattern generation.