Embedding Semantic Similarity in Tree Kernels for Domain Adaptation of Relation Extraction

Relation Extraction (RE) is the task of extracting semantic relationships between entities in text. Recent studies on relation extraction are mostly supervised. The clear drawback of supervised methods is the need of training data: labeled data is expensive to obtain, and there is often a mismatch between the training data and the data the system will be applied to. This is the problem of domain adaptation. In this paper, we propose to combine (i) term generalization approaches such as word clustering and latent semantic analysis (LSA) and (ii) structured kernels to improve the adaptability of relation extractors to new text genres/domains. The empirical evaluation on ACE 2005 domains shows that a suitable combination of syntax and lexical generalization is very promising for domain adaptation.