Transfer Learning for Low Resource Multilingual Relation Classification

Abstract

Relation classification (sometimes called ‘extraction’) requires trustworthy datasets for fine-tuning large language models, as well as for evaluation. Data collection is challenging for Indian languages, because they are syntactically and morphologically diverse, as well as different from resource-rich languages like English. Despite recent interest in deep generative models for Indian languages, relation classification is still not well-served by public data sets. In response, we present IndoRE, a dataset with 21K entity- and relation-tagged gold sentences in three Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi and Telugu), plus English. We start with a multilingual BERT (mBERT) based system that captures entity span positions and type information, and provides competitive performance on monolingual relation classification. Using this baseline system, we explore transfer mechanisms between languages and the scope to reduce expensive data annotation while achieving reasonable relation extraction performance.