Competition or Cooperation? Exploring Unlabeled Data via Challenging Minimax Game for Semi-supervised Relation Extraction

Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction aims at learning well-performed RE models with limited labeled and large-scale unlabeled data. Existing methods mainly suffer from semantic drift and insufficient supervision, which severely limit the performance. To address these problems, recent work tends to design dual modules to work cooperatively for mutual enhancement. However, the consensus of two modules greatly restricts the model from exploring diverse relation expressions in unlabeled set, which hinders the performance as well as model generalization. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel competition-based method AdvSRE. We set up a challenging minimax game on unlabeled data between two modules, Generator and Discriminator, and assign them with conflicting objectives. During the competition game, one module may find any possible chance to beat the other, which develops two modules' abilities until relation expressions cannot be further explored. To exploit label information, Discriminator is further asked to predict specific relation for each sentence. Experiment results on two benchmarks show new state-of-the-art performance over baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed AdvSRE.