Deep Residual Learning for Weakly-Supervised Relation Extraction

Deep residual learning (ResNet) (He et al., 2016) is a new method for training very deep neural networks using identity mapping for shortcut connections. ResNet has won the ImageNet ILSVRC 2015 classification task, and achieved state-of-theart performances in many computer vision tasks. However, the effect of residual learning on noisy natural language processing tasks is still not well understood. In this paper, we design a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) with residual learning, and investigate its impacts on the task of distantly supervised noisy relation extraction. In contradictory to popular beliefs that ResNet only works well for very deep networks, we found that even with 9 layers of CNNs, using identity mapping could significantly improve the performance for distantly-supervised relation extraction.