Open Information Extraction with Meta-pattern Discovery in Biomedical Literature

Biomedical open information extraction (BioOpenIE) is a novel paradigm to automatically extract structured information from unstructured text with no or little supervision. It does not require any pre-specified relation types but aims to extract all the relation tuples from the corpus. A major challenge for open information extraction (OpenIE) is that it produces massive surface-name formed relation tuples that cannot be directly used for downstream applications. We propose a novel framework CPIE (Clause+Pattern-guided Information Extraction) that incorporates clause extraction and meta-pattern discovery to extract structured relation tuples with little supervision. Compared with previous OpenIE methods, CPIE produces massive but more structured output that can be directly used for downstream applications. We first detect short clauses from input sentences. Then we extract quality textual patterns and perform synonymous pattern grouping to identify relation types. Last, we obtain the corresponding relation tuples by matching each quality pattern in the text. Experiments show that CPIE achieves the highest precision in comparison with state-of-the-art OpenIE baselines, and also keeps the distinctiveness and simplicity of the extracted relation tuples. CPIE shows great potential in effectively dealing with real-world biomedical literature with complicated sentence structures and rich information.