Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction through Entity-Pair-Level Interaction Modeling

Document-level relation extraction aims at extracting relational facts between two entities in a document. Existing approaches mainly focus on target entities, utilizing techniques such as graph neural networks to enhance their representations. However, they ignore the rich semantic correlations among entity pairs which provide wider and multifaceted information at a higher level. In this paper, we propose the Relation-based Entity-pair-level Inference (REI) model, which facilitates information interaction at the entity-pair level, enhancing logical reasoning among entities and capturing semantic correlations among entity pairs. Our REI model comprises two modules: Relation-based Information Aggregation (RIA) and Entity-pair-level Information Interaction (EII). The RIA module builds and integrates relation representations to filter out distractions from unrelated entity pairs, while the EII module models entity-pair-level information interaction through multi-head attentions. Extensive experiments on the DocRED, DWIE, CDR, and GDA datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed REI model, outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we provide detailed experimental analyses based on the performance gains and illustrate the interpretability.